← Dan Snow's History Hit
Dan Snow's History Hit
Saint Petersburg: Putin's Hometown
00:49:38
The turbulent history of this magnificent city, from its founding right up to the present day.
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- [00:00]
Dan Snow
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Our Skin Tells a Story Join me, Holly Fry, and a slate of incredible guests as we are all inspired by their journeys with psoriasis. Along with these uplifting and candid personal histories, we take a step back into the bizarre and occasionally poisonous history of our skin and how we take care of it. Whether you're looking for inspiration on your own skincare journey or are curious about the sometimes strange history of how we treat our skin, you'll find genuine, empathetic, transformative conversations here on our skin. Listen to our skin on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [02:02]
Unknown Host
Welcome to Dan Snow's history hit in May 1703, Peter, tsar of all Russia, drove the Swedish out of this particular corner of Ingria, a territory that you could say today, I suppose would be Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, and the parts of Russia that border on the Baltic Sea. The key fortress there, the key Swedish fortress, Nyanchantz. Peter captured that, and with that came finally, Russian imperial access, defensible access to the Baltic, down the River Neva, into the Gulf of Finland. It was a big moment in the expansion of Russia, Peter didn't waste any time at all. Like I say, in a matter of days he'd laid the foundations of the first building to take shape in what he wanted to be a new city, a northern powerhouse. Tellingly, that first building was military. It was the Peter and Paul Fortress. And then, as soon as they could be hired, German and Dutch engineers were brought to Russia to drain the swampy ground. And soon city blocks started to appear. The buildings that would be constructed there were inspired by the baroque architectural fashions of Europe. There would be canals with beetling boats carrying people to and fro, a deliberate echo of Venice and Amsterdam, his own enormous palace. In his new city, naturally an homage to Versailles. The conditions there were savage, freezing winters, mosquito ridden summers. Peter ordered that there should be a yearly roundup of 40,000 serfs. So every dozen or so households would have to contribute one person. They had to provide their own tools, they had to provide their own food for a journey of hundreds of miles on, on foot, sometimes chained together in gangs, guarded by the military to prevent desertion. And they would then arrive and work themselves, often to death, on Peter's new infrastructure project. His glorious city, St. Petersburg, rested on a bed of human bones. And the bones of the builders wouldn't be the last. This is the story of Peter's great city, the city in which Vladimir Putin was born after another great war was fought for mastery of this region. It's a story of city and empire building and it's also a story of Russia's obsession and also competition with the West. To help us understand St. Petersburg, tell the story of its rise, its revolutions, its near complete destruction and its rebirth, here is Sinclair Mackay. He's been on the podcast many times before. He's written a beautiful book about the firebombing of Dresden. We heard from him on the pod earlier this year talking about that, the anniversary. And he's back now with a new book, St. Petersburg Sacrifice and Redemption in the City that defied Hitler. He's going to take us through that long history. Enjoy.
- [04:55]
Holly Fry
T minus 10.
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Dan Snow
Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
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Madison H.
God save the king.
- [05:00]
Naomi Ekparigan
No Black White Unity till there is first and Black Unity never to go.
- [05:05]
Dan Snow
To war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower.
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Unknown Host
Sinclair, great to have you back on the pod.
- [05:16]
Dan Snow
Oh, great to be asked back. Very, very nice to be back, thank you.
- [05:18]
Unknown Host
Let's start with the geography. Let's start with the stuff beneath our feet. The area we now know is St. Petersburg. What did that look like for the vast, vast majority of geological time.
- [05:28]
Dan Snow
Gosh. Well, in geological time, it's kind of frozen marshland. It's extraordinarily kind of inhospitable territory to plant a beautiful city. This was what Peter the Great came back from London 1703, and as the poet Alexander Pushkin put he who with a will unbounded a city on the marshlands founded here is a realm of lakes and sphagnum moss just on the edge of the Baltic. So we're up at the very, very north western corner of Russia where it borders Finland and borders the Baltic States.
- [06:00]
Unknown Host
It was a frozen marshland, but it did have that critical access to the sea.
- [06:05]
Dan Snow
Indeed. So, yes.
- [06:06]
Unknown Host
So what about the political geography? Is it comfortably Russian or are there neighbouring nations, powers, enemies nearby?
- [06:12]
Dan Snow
There's a constant of conflict with Sweden and what become Finland and Poland, Lithuania. So it's never a particularly easy region. And in terms of geography, the site that is now St Petersburg lies on a series of strange borderlands, really. Now, famously, in 1703, it was envisaged for Peter the Great as being, you know, Russia's window onto the west. But a window obviously may be gazed through in either direction. And you do, you do wonder. Here is a city that comes back to being a lot of it on slave labor. You know, a lot of St Petersburg has the bones buried into its structure of slave labour who died in the course of the construction of it. So it's a city partly confounded in the starkness, but it is a city that's almost extravagantly, opulently European from the start, as opposed to perhaps a lot of other places deeper in Russia, because you have immediately this throughout the 18th century, just a whole Italian architecture, wild Baroque constructions, Neoclassical constructions everywhere. So there's Italian architects and then with the coming of the Industrial Revolution, you get a whole bunch of Scottish engineers from the start. It's an incredibly polyglot kind of place.
- [07:20]
Unknown Host
It's an architectural and political statement, Right?
- [07:23]
Dan Snow
Yes.
- [07:24]
Unknown Host
So Peter the Great, we should probably tell people, Peter the Great is this extraordinary, in all sense of the word figure, a giant of a man. He's a Russian tsar. But is he the first of the tsars to really become obsessed by what's going on further west in Europe and try and sort of Europeanize Russia?
- [07:39]
Dan Snow
Absolutely. So he's the first of the tsars with a real kind of worldview at a time when this was a new kind of age of empire. The end of the 17th century, the beginning of the 18th century, a whole new empire started to be formed. And he was very conscious of that. He was actually, funny enough, where I live in London, I'm not too far away from a statue of Peter the Great that overlooks the River Thames down in Deptford. Because he lived in Detroit for a while when it was part of the naval dockyards. He rented a house off Sir John Evelyn, who reported back that he was a terrible tenant. He apparently left the place trashed. But the point is that Peter the Great was fascinated by witnessing Britain's expansion pulsing kind of outwards, as exemplified by these documents, but also fascinated by the science of Greenwich Observatory and the new growing science of astronomy. So he was bringing in all sorts of European influences, bringing European influences back with him to the city that he was determined to summon these palaces of stone summoned from this extraordinarily inhospitable terrain. But as you say, just at the mouth of the Baltic, which is a fantastic place for these huge shipyards, which he also founded. When we think of St. Petersburg, now such a city of the imagination, we all have these images of these extraordinary spires and domes and cathedral cathedrals and wild palaces with their extraordinary color. And you're gonna think, well, it kind of must have been there forever, but it's only been there for. For 300 years or so. It's a very young city.
- [08:58]
Unknown Host
And Russia, we should. Quick just. Again, quick bit of background here. Russia had grown from the Principality of Moscow. It's one of the most amazing stories, really, in world history. The Principality of Moscow, one of a dizzying number of little statelets across Eurasia, you know, like Brandenburg or something. And it just goes on this one of the great imperial expansions of all time. And they go north first. So is the first Russian port, Archangel. Effectively, people will be familiar, perhaps from the Second World War, the Arctic convoys. So that northern coast of Russia, which is on the Arctic.
- [09:32]
Dan Snow
Yes. And with that, Certainly through the 19th century, you get Russia's increasing influence within what we know as Finland. Before Finland was an independent state, it was the Grand Duchy of the Tsars. So that was, in essence, a kind of imperial possession. Right.
- [09:45]
Unknown Host
And that's not a great port because it's frozen up.
- [09:48]
Dan Snow
No, that's frozen up. The distinction here is the northern ports do froze up. You know, they always needed the warm water ports further south, too.
- [09:54]
Unknown Host
Lovely warm Baltic. Yeah, great.
- [09:56]
Dan Snow
Yes, yes.
- [09:57]
Unknown Host
And the Black Sea is not conquered until after Peter. And he's got these neighbors, the mighty Swedish Empire, and he's got the mighty Polish Empire. So if he wants to sort of reach out and Connect with the rest of Europe and trade and bring in military engineers and whatever else. He's got to do it through this little, tiny little bit of access to the Baltic and St Petersburg's the logical place to do it. It's fascinating.
- [10:18]
Dan Snow
Yes, yes, no, it is. But what is also doubly fascinating, on top of that, as you imagine a kind of port city, what you don't usually link up with port cities is an exuberance of aesthetic beauty. This seems to be the case of St. Peterborough. It was also very prone to flooding, incidentally, as well. There was a terrible flood in 1824 in which the city was half submerged. And again, there was always this sense with Petersburg from the start that they existed on this borderline. There were another quite Europe, nor quite Russian. Then, of course, there was the borderline that dissolved between night and day. You've got the famous white nights in the midsummer when the sun never really sets beneath the horizon, producing this faintly uncanny atmosphere. In the winter, the daylight rarely comes. And then there was the border between land and seas. There were a lot of Petersburgers who understood the city to be a kind of like an Old Testament ark, so floating on sometimes kind of hostile waters.
- [11:08]
Unknown Host
Not for nothings, it's sometimes called the Venice of the North.
- [11:11]
Dan Snow
Yeah, yeah. But, yes, but then on top of that, there is also always rooted in this grubby reality. So you have the exuberance of these palaces and churches, but then on top of that, you had an extraordinary fast growing industry. First the Naval Dockhouse, but then the Putilov Works. As I mentioned previously, Scottish engineers being involved in bringing industrial might to St Petersburg. These huge, huge citadels of industry were starting to spring up at the start of the 19th century, creating special rails to bring railways to Russia. Quite a different proposition to railways in Britain.
- [11:41]
Unknown Host
Did Peter, from the beginning, you mentioned this architectural exuberance? Did he insist on that?
- [11:46]
Dan Snow
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
- [11:47]
Unknown Host
Because as a Brit, we're so used to laissez faire government.
- [11:50]
Dan Snow
Well, yes, him and his successors. It became an implanted tradition in a city that was still only a few years old. You see it now in the Peterhof, the Catherine palace, these amazing architectural fantasies. But Fantasia's not of Russia, but of Europe. It's still the case, actually, with St Petersburg. Now I've got a few Russian friends who are not from either St Petersburg or Moscow, they're from deeper within the country. Samara. And they said that there's. All the way through the history of St Petersburg, there's been sort of lurking resentment from a lot of other Russians towards St Petersburg, because here was a city that also was constantly set up as this kind of a self consciously literary city, a self consciously artistic city, as Peter the Great, who brought ballet to Saint Petersburg for the delight of the workers as well as the aristocrats. And there is a sense elsewhere with Russia just a suspicion that possibly the city that Peter founded was just that shade too European.
- [12:38]
Unknown Host
Talk about coastal elites. I mean, this is the ultimate. This is the original, and it's constructed with the blood and the sweat and the tears of thousands of effectively enslaved people.
- [12:50]
Dan Snow
Effectively enslaved people. A lot of prisoners of war, a lot of Swedish prisoners of war, but yes, effectively enslaved people. And of course, Russia itself, with the system of serfs, it was essentially kind of empire of slavery. I mean, you might argue that all empires have an element of slavery about them, but yes, it's a city that's founded on the bones and the blood of so many.
- [13:08]
Unknown Host
And they're digging out drainage ditches, they're trying to drain the land and then they're banging piles in. And so you can build these huge edifices above in miserable conditions.
- [13:16]
Dan Snow
Yes. I mean, the winters in St Petersburg, well, as you would expect in the north, particularly brutal and severe. So, yes, as Alexander Pushkin put it in that poem when he said, with will unbounded, there is certainly an element of truth, because the city does seem to be a subconscious effort of will and just to keep it there, seems conscious of effort of world too.
- [13:36]
Unknown Host
And it works in some terms because it becomes one of the great European cities. Noble families move there. It's all very fancy, it's. It's high culture. And I learned from your book, within two decades, it's handling 90% of Russia's foreign trade. So this, it is this window on the rest of the world.
- [13:53]
Dan Snow
Absolutely. And it's very open to that world as well. As I say, it's very sort of polyglot city. Huge numbers of Germans come to settle in St Petersburg over the decades, particularly through the 19th century, but you also get huge numbers of people from the Baltic states, huge numbers of people coming up from Ukraine. An extraordinary range of religions, too, implanted in the city. I can't remember exactly when the first mosque opened, but certainly the city central mosque still stands. There were always a certain number of Muslim people, very large Jewish population from quite early on. And unlike the rest of Russia, Russia riven and torn with these hideous pogroms in the czarist times. Terrible, terrible, terrible firestorms of anti Semitism, intriguingly in St. Petersburg there was always an undercurrent of anti Semitism, there was always kind of anti Jewish feeling, but it never kind of erupted onto the streets. And so as a result, the Jewish population of St. Petersburg were much more, I hate the term, but assimilated than they were perhaps in other places in Russia. That together with the dizzyingly fast expansion of industry and the huge number of country folk flooding into the city through the 19th century makes it, I suppose, goes a little way towards explaining how it so quickly became a kind of cradle of revolution too.
- [15:04]
Unknown Host
Yeah, so it's interesting because not only is it an aristocratic playground, but it also becomes Russia's leading industrial city and with all of the class based politics that that brings.
- [15:14]
Dan Snow
Indeed so, yes, but on the one hand you have Tolstoy's War and Peace, where as you say, the aristocrats are going to the grand balls and the extraordinary palaces night after night. But then on the other side of the southern side of the city, you have, as I said, these extraordinary citadels of industry and extraordinary early kind of housing products very, very rudimen to house the huge numbers of people who are needed to work.
- [15:40]
Unknown Host
And as a result it's St. Petersburg where the great milestones of revolution seem to all take place. Let's talk about the first. Well, there's been many. We can spend a long time talking about instability in the late tsarist regime. But let's talk about the first one that was a revolution in the 20th century, 1905. Did that start in St. Petersburg?
- [16:00]
Dan Snow
It did, yes. And it had been brewing for some years beforehand. Throughout the 19th century there had been, I suppose, secret hermetic societies of radicals who had been forming a meeting in St. Petersburg and moving among the industrial workers, secretly trying to radicalize the industrial workers. Among them was Lenin's older brother who was then hanged for sedition. The tsarist regime policing itself fearsomely with the okra terrifyings of secret police. But then you have Lenin himself, you have Lenin's wife to be educating the workers with special Sunday evening classes. But these were the opposite of religious Sunday evening classes. Instead of teaching the gospel, she was teaching Marx, but she was also teaching these workers literacy and numeracy and all sorts of other subjects. They were desperate to know about everything from geography to evolution and whether it was possible for this new world to outgrow its old God. So those seeds of revolution were being sowed quite a way before. And then in 1881, we have the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in St. Petersburg. An extraordinary Moment of terrifying political violence carried out by a group called Narodnaya Volya, the People's Will. Again, one of these secret hermetic St. Petersburg societies of red revolutionaries, young revolutionaries, some of them aristocrats. And this was, in essence, I think, one of the world's first suicide bombings. A young student who threw a bomb down at the Tsar's feet or the Tsar's carriage. It caught the Tsar, it obviously caught the bomber too. And this led, in turn, the shock of the assassination of Alexander II led to even more oppression from the regime, even more cracking down on perceived seditious elements within that industry. So by the time you get to 1905 and you get to the hunger caused by the Russo Japanese War, you get all sorts of discontent in the factories. These were people being made to work 13, 14 hours or 15 hour shifts. The demands of the 1905 petitioners, actually is not too madly unreasonable. They're calling for a working day of 11 and a half hours in some cases, just to improve some of the conditions, but also to bring about some kind of constitutional monarchy to try and end absolutist rule. What happens on that Winter's Day is January 1905 is a peaceful march on the Winter Palace. Thousands on thousands of people, people marching through the streets in order to present this petition, led by this charismatic Orthodox piece, Father Gaypon. And what happens is the troops open fire on them and they start cutting them to pieces with sabers. And there is a nightmare massacre unfolds in the streets of Petesville on the same day, incidentally, the wealthier shoppers in the Nevsky Prospect, going to the fashionable stores of Nevsky Prospect, the furriers, the furniture stores that side of the city is still carrying on, while just around the corner near the Winter palace, people have been cut down in their hundreds. Then huge unrest which spread from there right the way across the country. The strikes, the new electricities have shut down. Railways jutted to a halt. The end result of it was the establishment of a constitutional monarchy and the establishment of the Duma, which the regime would then rode back on. But it was the start. It was the first flickering flame of the larger revolution that was to come.
- [19:05]
Unknown Host
And so let's move to 1917. You've got an even greater. I mean, the Russo Japanese War was a disaster. By 1917, the Russian war effort in the first war is a catastrophe.
- [19:14]
Dan Snow
Yes, yeah.
- [19:15]
Unknown Host
Vast, vast losses, even more ramping up industrial production. So I imagine tough, very tough times, not just on the front line, but in the factories.
- [19:22]
Dan Snow
Hunger, oh, yes. Terrible times in the factories. Yes.
- [19:25]
Unknown Host
And I mean, you know, the Russian winter is not that fun anyway, at the very best of times, I imagine. So in February you're probably feeling a bit grumpy again. This rev, this famous revolution, infamous revolution again. It starts in St. Petersburg, doesn't it?
- [19:38]
Dan Snow
Yes, it starts in St. Petersburg, as you say. There is the war that's been grinding on, families losing loved ones in their millions. I mean, the Russian casualty figures are just absolutely so terrifying. And on top of this, as you say, you have hunger too. There's the most ferocious rationing in Petersburg, or Petrograd as it was then, because Petersburg was deemed too German by then. So Petrograd sees terrible, terrible hunger, gaunt workers who, being madly overworked anyway, who could barely stand up, was still being forced into these production lines. So yes, the discontent is growing and growing and growing and the flame is growing, growing. It can't be held back even then with St Petersburg. I'm always interested in how famously there is the story of Rasputin in 1916, the Holy fool of the Tsar and his wife, this extraordinary wild eyed mendicant who was actually neither mad nor a monk, but always and just that, I suppose the uncanny symbolism of the scandal, of the perception of this extraordinary drunken, lecherous holy man and his influence on the Russian royal family and the fear that it's actually a figure like him, the slightly uncanny shaman, could tip the balance so far that the royal family be brought down by him. And so that's the reason why Rasputin had to be assassinated by a group of aristocrats. But that in turn, the city always had a very strong sense of itself and a strong sense of itself in terms of stories. And that was a story that's quickly kind of picked up. Here is almost a sort of self perpetuating revolutionary moment. But as we say, it's a long, long in the making. There are many, many, many elements and strands in all of this. But the city also as cradle revolution, as a cradle of industry and aesthetics, the city always had an innate sense of its own in a wake of theatricality as well. There was good performance in it. This was a performance when revolution came, that was self constantly for the world.
- [21:27]
Unknown Host
You're listening to Dan Snow's History. There's more to come.
- [21:37]
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Sinclair Mackay
Our skin tells a Story Join me, Holly Fry and a slate of incredible guests as we are all inspired by their journeys with psoriasis. Along with these uplifting and candid personal histories, we take a step back into the bizarre and occasionally poisonous history of our skin and how we take care of it. Whether you're looking for inspiration on your own skincare journey or are curious about the sometimes strange history of how we treat our skin, you'll find genuine, empathetic, transformative conversations here on our skin. Listen to our skin on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [23:20]
Dan Snow
Hey prime members, you can listen to this show ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app Today the.
- [23:37]
Unknown Host
Tsarist regime was unable to keep order in St. Petersburg, partly because it's had sent many of its finest units to go and fight in Ukraine, interestingly, where they had been badly mauled. What happened in 1917? In 1905 the Tsar was able to claw back his own power. But in 1917, did they even try? Did the streets of St. Petersburg run red with blood? Or was it was the Tsar just toppled?
- [24:02]
Dan Snow
Nothing, I suppose dissolves so far. There's power, it vanishes like a ghost. And that seemed to be the case in St. Petersburg. It's not so much that the streets were running red with blood. It was even though there were kind of outbreaks of anarchy. There were snipers on roofs. There were a lot of war damaged veterans too, with gunners who were firing randomly. That kind of wasn't it. It was more just the. The consciousness that a new age had could have come into being. Obviously propelled enormously by the charnel house of the war in which so many of the citizens had been thrown into this dreadful mob and a sense that it couldn't be sustained anymore. But also here, yes, I mean here Petersburg understood itself and understood the world has changed so fast that it was a moment of modernism actually in a curious way. I mean it's more than revolution politically, it's a revolution philosophically and religiously too. It's the most extraordinary instant kind of sea chain Sinclair.
- [24:59]
Unknown Host
It's often said in the end that the Tsar lacked the sort of brutal, callous willingness to just shoot vast numbers of his own people that the Soviets would later go on to show in spades. The Tsar says, doesn't he, to his generals, don't go in there and start murdering vast numbers of people.
- [25:19]
Dan Snow
Well I mean this comes after decades of Tsarist oppression through the means of the Okrana, the secret police. St Petersburg had been extraordinarily repressive and ruled by terror. In essence any hints of sedition or dissent would be dealt with in the most merciless way. But I suppose 1916, 1917 you have Tsar who is Tsar Nicholas II is a recognizable human being. He's quite sensitive in some ways and also when you have a city and a nation that's been suffering so terribly in this nightmare conflict, the likes of which has never been seen before, it's not an element of mercy on his part. It's also just an element of realism really. And how do you turn the guns on? One and a half million, two million people? It is a. Do you destroy an entire city for the sake of maintaining your own regime? I mean you can't, you can't in the end fight the world and St Petersburgers at that time in a way kind of emblematic of the world and of a new age. That's technology spreadings of electricity, chemical works. The Tsarist world is kind of very much a pre modern one and he can't fight, you know, rather like St Petersburg can't fight the tides of flood, the Tsar can't fight the tides of history.
- [26:27]
Unknown Host
So the crowds just take over the key public buildings in St Petersburg and you see a provisional government that the bit of the Russian Revolution lots of people might not remember. There are then months of quite exciting political and social upheaval. People trying to debate, work out what's the future for the Russian Empire. This provisional government decided to continue the war against the Germans quite wholeheartedly. And then you get the growing power of Lenin and his communists and again that is St Petersburg led.
- [26:56]
Dan Snow
It is very much. It's the very presence of Lenin and his return to St Petersburg that then becomes one of those emblematic moments. The arrival at the Finland Station there was that wonderful painting of Lenin getting off the train which Stalin Then had himself added into later. So you see Stalin behind Lenin in the railway carriage, wearing a rather jaunty cap. And again, here is one of those moments where the pendulum absolutely decisively kind of swings. As I say again, there are so many millions of strands involved in the story, because you're talking about a city of sums of two and a half million, three million people by this stage. It's incredibly populous and you would expect in such a revolution huge amounts of violence and all the rest. But actually, at the start there isn't. There's the story forming of the Winter palace, which then they grab hold of the Smalley Institute, which the American journalist John Reed was nipping in and out of his eyewitness account of those extraordinary moments of passion with various Bolshevik deputies, industrial configures, workers, soldiers, all trying to work out what the contours of this new world are. And also, I suppose, the contours, the repercussions of what it is that they're doing, because they know that the entire world is looking in on them. They know that the entire world is both fascinated and aghast and in awe of what's taking place in St. Petersburg and amid this extraordinary kind of 18th century architecture too, which gives it a further kind of element of, I suppose, incongruity, as I say, the Bolshevik takeover of the Smolny Institute, which they then held onto for years and years and years afterwards. The Smalley Institute was originally an academy for young ladies, built in the 18th century. This fantastically dainty building, marigold yellow. And here are the ideas and the passions that are going to roll across the world like a tsunami and change the entire 20th century is extraordinary.
- [28:37]
Unknown Host
And this is what I find so extraordinary, Sinclair, is Russia the largest country on earth, and yet what seems to happen in its little tiny northwest corner of it, in St Petersburg, just that does seem to set the agenda for this vast empire. Obviously the Soviets would have to fight a civil war and it would be. It was not a simple thing to Sovietize the Russian Empire, but it really matters who's sitting in those buildings in St. Petersburg.
- [29:03]
Dan Snow
It does become, yes, because even though Lenin is quite quick to move the capital from St Petersburg to Moscow, so under the czars, the St. Petersburg have been not just the capital of Russia, but also the seat of an empire. And it's Lenin who moves it very quickly, the capital to Moscow, but St Petersburg remains absolutely kind of key both to the political thinking, but also to the philosophy of Bolshevism too. It's always intriguing the figures that, who are appointed to rule over St. Petersburg, in effect, the first party secretaries. You have Sergey Kirov in the late 1920s, early 1930s, who was very close to Stalin, possibly too close for his own good. I'll explain the first party secretary of Leningrad, because what you have here in the city is this extraordinary industrial capacity for producing military equipment. It's basically the one of the armaments hubs of Russia and that gives it terrific strategics of importance. So as I say, you have Sergey Kirov in charge of the city. Sergey Kirov in December 1934 was sitting in his paneled office in the Smolny Institute, which I mentioned earlier, and there was a tap who managed to get into the building, somehow managed to get past security and fire a revolver at Kirov, killing him instantly. Kirov was assassinated, shot in the head. His assassin tried to shoot himself, somehow failed. The gun must have slipped from his hand or the enormity of what he had done must have sunk in. He was arrested. But that was the start then of a series of accusations and counter accusations which started themselves to spread like a firestorm. In essence, the assassination of Kirov was the start of Stalin's purges of the 1930s. That moment in 1934 when the ruling party officials turned on so called Mensheviks and people who had been in rival factions to Stalin. In the 1920s. That nightmare of terror of the purges which stretched through every single level of Russian society started in St. Petersburg, Leningrad. Thousands upon thousands of victims, Party officials were being dragged out of their flats in the darkness of the night. Either then just to be immediately executed or to be sent off to the deathly wildernesses of the, of the, the various labor camps. You know, the purges are almost. They're still kind of beyond rationality and they're still the subject of so much kind of academic debate because Stalinist history is like a mirror maze. You know, the more lurid conspiracy theories suddenly discovered to be in fact lurid reality and vice versa. But again, it's in St. Petersburg where the, the spark starts this terrible storm that then races right the way across the country, destroying not only countless civilians, but also destroying huge numbers of key military personnel, which will then be a factor that Hitler will take very close attention to.
- [31:48]
Unknown Host
Well, let's move forward to the Second World War. Now Hitler is paying close attention to the purges and the poor performance of the Soviet Red army in Finland, for example. It encourages him to invade. Now he invades, he splits his troops in 1941, doesn't he? Because he's got Leningrad, he's got Moscow and he's got the bread basket and the oil of the south and Ukraine. He decides to go for them all, doesn't he? But he gets pretty close to Leningrad.
- [32:11]
Dan Snow
He gets very, very close to Leningrad. Well, indeed, he gets very close to Moscow too, Governor. At some stage they're within about 15 miles of Moscow. They can certainly see it through their binoculars. I mean, Operation Barbarossa, the scale of it still is absolutely beyond comprehension. Here you are in June 1941, two years previously, there had been the Molotov Ribbentrop pact of non aggression between Germany and Russia. Extraordinary cynical move which, which takes the world completely aback, leaving Hitler free to continue his deathly march across Western Europe and leaving Stalin and the Bolsheviks under the sense of illusion that they're kind of out of it for the time being. But you mentioned earlier the winter war in 1939 with Finland. This is absolutely key for what happens to Leningrad in the siege during the Second World War. In late 1939, just after Hitler and Stalin's Russia between them had grabbed Poland against carnage, bloodshed, mad, horrible oppression on both sides through the Baltic states too, the Stalinists leaning very, very heavily on the Baltic states. Stalin decided that he had to go for Finland as well. He really, he had to possess Finland. Part of it was paranoia about Hitler. He was worried that Hitler would team up with the Finns. But part of it was just that ancients of ironic communist imperialist twitch, they just simply cannot help themselves, those old imperialist instinc. And in the autumn of 1939, Stalin is convinced that the Red army could simply march into Finland and take Helsinki within two or three days. A tiny population of 5 million. How could they possibly stand against it? What then transpired was an extraordinarily bloody bitter conflict held in the. In the Corellian forests, these forests of birch and lakes and some reindeer, no good for modern tanks. The senior Soviet commanders spotted instantly. Oh, right, okay. And on top of this, Finland's Mannerheim had established the most extraordinary defensive over the previous three years, because Finland had always been worried about Stalin. In essence, the Winter War isn't very long. The Red army with its huge numbers prevails in the end, but only at the most amazing cost. I think they lose something like 750,000 people to a tiny Finnish army that's basically operating with skis and reindeers, but extraordinarily agile. They can't maintain it in the end, obviously they can't command. But in that crucial moment, Hitler is looking on and seeing a Red army that's completely confused, incredibly ill equipped. This makes the prospect of operation barbarossa In 1941 a terrible, terrible possibility. But as I've mentioned earlier, the scale of Operation Barbarossa, you imagine it 1,000 miles from the Baltic Sea in the north to the back sea in the south. Ranged right the way in this line down Eastern Europe, 3 million troops troops, most of them German, some of them remaining, some, some from the Spanish Blue division that the Wehrmacht has been joined by all sorts of people, this extraordinary kind of fighting force just roaring across Eastern Europe in three kind of spear points. Army group centers heading towards Moscow. You've got the south, the oil fields of Caucasus and its army group north who are heading towards Leningrad. Leningrad is still at that stage perceived to be a crucial target because it's in Leningrad where these huge city cells of this industry are producing tanks, airplanes. Here is where the Red army and the Red Air Force is basically being equipped. If the Nazis could capture Leningrad, they would strangle Russia's ability to fight from that point onwards and throughout that summer of 1941 as they just blaze across Eastern Europe, Estonia, Lithuania, absolutely dissolving their weight, they get within about 18 miles of Leningrad. The Wehrmacht is essentially parked around the extraordinary palace palaces that you find in, in the suburbs. Sarko Cedar, as Pushkin as it lets be known, the Pitoff Palace, Catherine Palace. These are all knights possessions and they can see the spires and the domes of Leningrad in the distance. What happens next is one of those kind of great historical what ifs, you know, why didn't they then push into Leningrad? Why didn't they conquer the city by the winter of 1941?
- [36:15]
Unknown Host
You listen to Dan Snow's history, don't you? Anyway, there's more to come.
- [36:26]
Dan Snow
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- [36:28]
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- [36:52]
Sinclair Mackay
Check it out@lemonade.com pet our skin tells a story. Join me, Holly Fry and a slate of incredible guests as we are all inspired by their journeys with psoriasis along with these uplifting and candid personal histories, we take a step back into the bizarre, bizarre and occasionally poisonous history of our skin and how we take care of it. Whether you're looking for inspiration on your own skincare journey or are curious about the sometimes strange history of how we treat our skin, you'll find genuine, empathetic, transformative conversations here on our skin. Listen to our skin on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [37:44]
Unknown Host
Well, how did the Soviets manage to keep their hammer and sickle flying over that city?
- [37:48]
Dan Snow
It's an extraordinary story in many ways. There was a reluctance on after that amazing German advance, after the velocity of the Wehrmacht through those northern lands, the Red army at last started to organize some form of resistance after the initial terrible, terrible shock. So by the autumn of 1941, you do have a much more determined resistance from the Red Army. On top of that, the Germans. Germans under von Meeb looking at Leningrad and there's some reluctance to fight within the city because it would involve basically house to house fighting, snipers, a lot of asymmetric warfare I suppose we call it now. And there's a point where as the Wehrmacht stops outside Leningrad and sets itself up in the smaller towns like Gatchina and various other small towns around, turns them into good garrisons, there's suddenly a sense of momentum has gone. And at that point, Hitler, who has no kind of patience really for Leningrad, no sense of a feel of the city's history or anything that might even really be of use to the Nazis in the end, decides instead simply to condemn the city to death. It's decided that the city will be encircled by the wehrmachtunstead and the people within. No supplies will be able to get in. The people just be literally starved to death. There was in fact a bureaucratic memo that came out of Berlin at some point in 1941, where a civil servant, noting down the minutes of a meeting with various senior Nazi officials, said, it's expected that in the city of Leningrad X million will die. And they couldn't even bother to fill in what the number with the X was. It was just. That's how incredibly dismissive they were. Leningrad was simply going to just be forgotten. While the wider conquest of Moscow was.
- [39:18]
Unknown Host
The aim, and that siege would gone for 872 days.
- [39:21]
Dan Snow
It began in the autumn of 1941, where the city's veins and arteries were essentially cut off. The road links, all the rail links. There had been an attempt to evacuate a number of children and women from the city in that late Summer and the civilians had built the most extraordinary defences around the city. I mean, it was a civilian operation, millions of tank traps and trenches and shelters, but huge numbers of evacuated children were brought back to the city because the Germans had taken over so much of the Russian countryside. They were trying to get them to. And so by the winter of 1940, well, even just by the autumn of 1941, they understood suddenly that they were trapped. Trapped. They understood suddenly that Leningrad was alone and essentially cut off from the rest of Russia. It was a city, could have been solitary confinement. There were a number of terrible bombing raids because the Luftwaffe had mastery of the skies. They were dropping bombs on the city just absolutely relentlessly, day and night. So people were half crazed with sleep deprivation. There was one terrible night, September 8, 1941, where a series of timber based warehouses, the Bedayev warehouses, close to the center of the city, which had been used to contain huge amounts of non perishable foodstuffs for the city. Everything from pasta to dried fish to all the supplies that the city would have for a month went up in flames in the space of one night. Leningrad is puzzled by the extraordinary odour in the air of burning sugar. Couldn't quite place what it was then the realization what it was that what the Germans managed to hit, basically their food supplies, which would have seen them through not a huge amount of time through the next few weeks, but it still would have been a lifeline all up in smoke. And that's the moment when the citizens of Leningrad realize the full horror of what they're facing. It's not just the nightly bombing, it's not just the incessant shelling of factories, it's the fact that their rations, their daily rations of bread are now coming down to 200 grams, maybe 300 grams. They're working in heavy industry, but suddenly all anyone can think about is food, because suddenly there's no food anymore. There are airplanes that are managing to get past the Luftwaffe and drop in some supplies. For a city of one and a half million, two million people, it's not even going to scratch the surface. And so the desperate hunger begins very.
- [41:35]
Unknown Host
Quickly as the winter. It's a very cold winter, isn't it? But the small bit of good news that brings is that they can make ice roads across Lake Ladoga, can't they? So some supplies can get in across the frozen ice.
- [41:46]
Dan Snow
They can. Well, it has to be pointed out though, before they get to that stage. It was one of the hardest winters actually, for decades and decades. The temperatures started falling to minus 20, minus 30, and then to minus 43 by December 1941. Now these were people who were already kind of emaciated, who were living in apartments with shattered windows, because the bombs had shattered windows, no way of patching them up. Electricity was faltering, water supplies were faltering because the Germans had attacked so much of the infrastructure. You had to queue for the bakery at something like 4:30 in the morning in order to join the queue at a reasonable pace. You then had to spend hours in the snow, which was falling incessantly, waiting for a piece of bread would. Is not a great deal larger than a playing card. That would be your lot for the day. Or a weird little ration of cocoa powder. They would get. You would get some odd, random things, maybe a dried apricot, but then you'd have to take that back to your family, cut it up incredibly carefully, so everyone got an incredibly so fair share. People's dreams at night filled with hot meat dripping and buttery potatoes and the torture of hunger. And they all the Leningraders, understand what they're going through. The families who were once incredibly loving families turning on each other like snarling enemies because they're paranoid, they believe they're stealing food from each other. And then in the midst of the darkness, people's faces, people with particularly pale skin textures, suddenly noticed their flesh was starting to darken in patches because it was almost as if their blood was too apathetic to move properly. Then with the hunger, you also got the swelling bellies, which is a result of the water retention. People reported getting a sensation called the ants, which was insects burrowing under the flesh and moving around under the flesh. This was the body in desperation starting to consume itself. And Leningrad has all understood this. They became frightened to look in mirrors because what stared back of the mirrors was not recognizably their own features. There are so many diarists at the time, and people were encouraged to keep diaries. These civilians were writing of walking along incredibly silent, deserted, snowy streets and watching people around them simply sink to their knees and collapse in the snow. They couldn't go on. There were people just literally dying in the street. There were people out in those streets who were starting to hunt rats, because the cats and the dogs were family pets, had to be eaten quite quickly. Those were the measures of desperation that people were going to. And the dead had to queue to be buried. The enormous numbers of bodies kind of piling up, but there was no one to bury them. The gravediggers didn't have the strength to dig into the frozen earth. And they were going to need mass burial pits in any case, a mask of crematoria. And it was at that point that a few people in the furthest, darkest edges of desperation started to take bodies which had been stacked like logs and crematoriums, because there was at least the possibility of human meat, which became a black market resource in some of the markets. It is the most extraordinary story of the very, very limits of human nature and what could be stretched to. And the story also of other Leningraders who. The people largely who were driven to that desperation were refugees who didn't have ration cars cards, because they fell out of the official kind of rot of the city. If you didn't have a ration card, that was it. You were dead. There was no possibility of bread or anything. These were the people who were taking the bodies. And there was, incredibly, a measure of some compassion from some doctors and city authorities about this. The intelligence with which Leningrad has faced this ordeal is one of the most remarkable things about the story. But, yes, you mentioned Lake Ladoga. There's an incredibly huge lake as one of the biggest freshwater lakes, certainly in the north of the world. In the summer months, in the warm months, it's a huge shipping lane. As the winter comes, it all starts to freeze up. You've got these extraordinary ice floes creaking and shrieking in the northern darkness. And then, come December, it's completely frozen over. And it was the city authorities, again, with that kind of keen intelligence, who looked at this and thought, right, we're going to try some experiments using hydrographers. They got scientists out there to test the ice, to test what the ice could bear. They started sending horses and sleighs over it to see if they could transport supplies that way. And then it was determined that the ice was thick enough to bear motorized vehicles. What you then have is the most extraordinary spectacle. There are photographs of it which cannot capture the amazing feat. The ice road, the road of life across Lake Le Dugre, which starts sometimes on January 1942. It gets going properly where motorized convoys moving across this steel gray, featureless landscape of ice and snow. The navigation is provided by young women, the white angels, they were called, who were stationed at certain points along the ice across somehow 35 miles, set up with semis of permanent teepees on the ice to give them shelter. There were wavings of literally some red flags. That was the only way that the motorized convoys could navigate across this trackless, featureless prospect. So from the shores on the east, they were starting to be able to get supplies in to the city of the basic foodstuffs. But they're also then able to start taking people out. A proper evacuation began. There's mothers with very tiny children in open trucks in temperatures of minus 43 being driven. I still can't possibly imagine it actually, the blankness of this landscape, the air above droning with Luftwaffe, who are watching this convoy dropping bombs, smashing the ice as they do so, and the ice just suddenly opening up in any case, sometimes beneath vehicles, mother others desperately trying to hold on to wriggling babies in the midst of this. So it's an ordeal in its own right. But for the survivors who did make it back across, who were then greeted with kind of hot chocolate and some fresh food and kindness and smiles, something they hadn't seen for a very, very long time. No, it's kind of immeasurably haunting, the ingenuity with which Leningrad set about saving itself. But then the extraordinary strength that came in the following spring of 1942. The city still very much encircled, the siege still very much on, the bombing and the shelling absolutely incessant. But now with these just a vein of supply lines open again, livable living rations starting to come through again, something new sparks in the city. Suddenly the citizens of Leningrad are involved in the most extraordinary clear up. Perhaps a million deaths, just absolutely kind of unfathomable, for which there have to be some mass graves. But also on top of that, the cleanup of the city, that has to take place again. It's a huge civilian operation, and it's here that we start to see more of the parents of Vladimir Putin.
- [48:09]
Unknown Host
Aha.
- [48:11]
Dan Snow
Putin's mother and father, Leningrad, as they came to work in the city. Now Putin's father at tug of war is out with the Red Army. Putin's mother is living in the city with the firstborn, Victor. Victor Putin, who is a toddler. The story is horrible, hideous. Like so many other small children, Victor fell victim to starvation. There's nothing his mother could do do, absolutely nothing Putin's mother could do to save Victor. She herself was so close to death, she was actually mistaken for a corpse at one point and almost on the point of being loaded onto one of the sleds that they took the bodies away. It was found just in time that she was alive. So as a Putin would have had an older brother, Victor, were it not for the fact that Victor died age 2, and was then consigned along with so many others, to a mass grave. In the city, Putin still goes back every year for commemoration of ceremonies. And on these occasions, his anger kind of burns bright and it's unfeigned. I mean, you, you, you, you absolutely see it. But this is a city where by 1942, as I say, still encircled, still besieged. But Shostakovich and his symphony, the Leningrad Symphony, which would ring out across the world as a symbol of Russian endurance and Russian creativity, gets its premiere in Leningrad in August 1942, as it's broadcast across the world and it becomes a symbol of regeneration. By this time, even more supply lines being brought in, the Red army is beginning to fight back properly against the occupying German forces. And so even though the city is still besieged, there are now proper supplies of food coming in. So what you get in the rest of the siege is just regeneration and renewal on the most amazing kind of scale. There are beautiful photographs of children holding huge crook cappuccinos, which have been grown in the shadow of St Isaac's Cathedral. By 1944, January 1944, a brilliant general, Leonid Govorov, an artillery expert, has found the lateral means by which finally, finally chasing off the last of the Germans. And as I say, the Germans, the Wehrmacht, who seemed so absolutely immovable, vanish like ghosts again. The dissolution of power is so, so, so fast. And the Red army start chasing them back across East Europe. Leningrad in the meantime, the speed of the regeneration is just absolutely astounding. Its life is restored, even though it endures a fresh round of purges with the death of the city's party secretary, Andrei Zhydanov, who had been a close friend of Stalin, he died, but then the people around him suddenly fell victim to the purges because they were distrusted by Barrier and Milenkov. But after this fresh round of purges, through the 50s and the 60s, even during the darkest years of the Cold War, where the Soviet regime now has dominion over Eastern Europe, but Leningrad still remains this kind of outward facing city. By the 1950s, by the 1960s, it's accepting all sorts of school trips because of what we would now call soft power, I suppose the ballet, the extraordinary rich life of the poets. I didn't even mention the poets of the city declaiming their poetry during the siege to lift people's hearts. But here is a city where poetry changes living reality, and that carries on in the 1960s and 70s too. Now, Putin himself, born in 1952, by this stage, his father, I think, is working at the railways. I think his mother teaches him to read and write and arithmetic very, very early Putin is an ill behaved horror in primary school, even from the start, but he's picking as older kids. But Leningrad is also the kind of crucible for Putin because even though he and his family are living in a communal apartment, they're still communal apartments at this stage where they're sharing with three or four other families. There's very little in the way of indoor plumbing. If you want a bath, you have to go to the local sauna. So life is not rich, but it's not poor either. There are books in this household. As his parents are intelligent, they're not doing too badly. But Putin determines, he sees the aristocrats of Leningrad, the old monarchy where went in 1917. They were killed in 1918. But a new form of monarchy took place. Party officials, people like Andrei Zhardanov, and Putin could see the striations of Leningrad's society. It's more sensibility than money, but it's still there. And he determines that the way to rise in the society is through espionage. That's what really grabs his imagination. And it's Putin who determines that he's going to join the kgb, which is the, the unworthy successor to the Akran, the checker. That's the nkvd. And, and this he does. It's, it's Putin we see in the 1980s in Dresden as a KGB officer at the point when the Soviet system collapses. You look at photographs of Putin from then. He's actually a little tubby. He's going tubby on the, on the Dresden beer. It's Putin who returns to St. Petersburg, becomes its deputy mayor in the 1990s and in essence then becomes one of the city's aristocrats. Here is a city that's just honeycombed with corruption and backhanders and all the rest of it. But it's a city still with a sense of kind of exceptionalism, a sense of pride. That was always St. Petersburg's founding sin. The name Leningrad has dropped quite quickly after the Soviet regime collapses. The people of St. Petersburg is going back to St. Petersburg. That's what it is and that's what it shall remain. And that city's kind of old spirit, you know, the ballet is still going. The National Library and all its rare works are still very much part of the center of the city. But now we have its most famous son, Putin. It's impossible not to wonder how much his own mental landscape has been, I suppose, malformed by, you might say, generational trauma. I mean the suffering that his parents went through, the suffering that so many Leningraders went through. There's no excuse because millions of people suffered and they did not turn into despotic tyrants. So it's not in any way to either excuse or explain. But as I say, it's impossible not to wonder. I mean, if you look at footage, footage now of Putin giving those speeches at the sites of mass graves where he refers to his brother and says that it can't even be known where his brother is, there can be no possibility of a headstone. And as I say, the anger is real. Maybe the paranoia is real. Maybe, you know, those who have been invaded do have a different sensibility to those who have never known invasion. As I say, it's, it's speculation like that is fruitless. But the city from which he came still has this. I mean, in a way, it's difficult to see him as being totally part of it because there is this kind of acceptance, exceptionalism about St. Petersburg, a sense that it's still slightly different from the rest of Russia. My Russian friends say that even now going to St. Petersburg, there is the sense that not so much that it's kind of up itself, but just a sense that it. A sense of intellectual superiority which is slightly resented by a lot of other Russians and still remains a theme to this day.
- [54:23]
Unknown Host
Sinclair, thank you. That's a terrific place to end it. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Tell everyone what the new book is called.
- [54:31]
Dan Snow
And the new book is called St. Petersburg Sacrifice and Redemption in the City that Defied Hitler.
- [54:37]
Unknown Host
Well, Sinclair Mackay, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
- [54:39]
Dan Snow
Thank you very much. Thank you.
- [54:51]
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- [55:21]
Sinclair Mackay
Our skin tells a story. Join me, Holly Fry and a slate of incredible guests as we are all inspired by their journeys with psoriasis. Along with these uplifting and candid personal histories, we take a step back into the bizarre and occasionally poisonous history of our skin and how we take care of it. Whether you're looking for inspiration on your own skincare journey or are curious about the sometimes strange history of how we treat our skin, you'll find genuine, empathetic, transformative conversations here on our skin. Listen to our skin on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.