It was only in 1919 that Antsiferov admitted, “In the cosmic winds Russian imperialism found its tragic end. Petersburg stopped crowning Great Russia with its granite diadem. It became Red Piter. And Moscow, the porphyry-bearing widow, became the capital once again, the capital of the new Russia. And what of Petersburg?” And Antsiferov answered his rhetorical question, citing the prophetic lines from Andrei Bely’s epic novel,
The loss of status as capital was a horrible blow for Petrograd. Many of the site’s inherent weaknesses, compensated for two hundred years by the massive influx of money and labor, suddenly pushed to the fore. All at once it was remembered that the former capital was quite removed from the rest of Russia, so food as well as raw materials for its industry had to be delivered from afar; that it was located too close to the border, open to foreign invasions; and that the climate was bad, and that the city was regularly flooded.
Clearly Lenin weighed these considerations before deciding to return the Russian capital from Petrograd to Moscow. As he described it, he felt like a military leader “taking the tatters of a defeated army or one shattered by panicky flight deep into the interior.” But as was the case with Peter the Great’s determination to establish his capital at St. Petersburg, there was an emotional, almost irrational aspect to Lenin’s decision.
Lenin was the first to admit he didn’t know Russia well. No fewer than fifteen years of his short life (he died in 1924, at age fifty-three) were spent abroad. For Lenin, Russia was embodied in Petersburg, with its all-powerful, tsarist institutions that constantly persecuted him, its police and prisons, in one of which Lenin spent fourteen months after his arrest in 1895.
Lenin felt great hostility to monarchical and bureaucratic Petersburg. But he also despised and hated the Petersburg intelligentsia, whom he considered spineless, drooling liberals and, most important, counterrevolutionary. Lenin’s anti-intellectual position was confirmed in the recollections of many people, including those who admired him.
A typical, psychologically telling example is related by Lunacharsky. The writer Maxim Gorky, who had often defended the Petrograd intelligentsia before Lenin, came to him to complain about the arrest of people who had hidden many Bolsheviks, Lenin included, from the tsarist police before the revolution.
Lenin responded to Gorky’s complaint with a laugh and said that all those idealist liberals ought to be arrested exactly because they are such “fine, kind people,” who always aid the persecuted. First they hid Bolseheviks from the tsar, and now they protected counterrevolutionaries from the Bolsheviks. “And we,” Lenin concluded sternly, “need to catch and destroy active counterrevolutionaries. The rest is clear.”124
The move to Moscow was among other things an act of revenge, perhaps unconscious, on Lenin’s part against the Petrograd intelligentsia, whom the Bolshevik leader called “embittered … understanding nothing, forgetting nothing, having learned nothing,
Like Peter the Great breaking with Moscow to start Russian history afresh, Lenin left behind the former tsarist capital to assert his right to a radical experiment. In demoting Petrograd, Lenin demonstrated the seriousness of the new regime’s rejection of the old Russia, its institutions, and its intelligentsia. After leaving Petrograd, Lenin wrote to Gorky, who remained in the city: “The intellectual powers of the workers and peasants are growing in the struggle to overthrow the bourgeoisie and its helpers, the little intellectuals, the lackeys of capital, who consider themselves the brain of the nation. In fact they are not the brain, but the droppings.”126
With the government’s move to Moscow, Lunacharsky’s dire predictions about Petrograd’s fate immediately came to pass. Unemployment and economic dislocation increased not daily but hourly, and the population began to decline dramatically. In postrevolutionary Russia the population fell throughout the country, but overall decline and population losses were the greatest in Petrograd.
In 1915 Petrograd had 2,347,000 people. But on June 2, 1918, just two and a half months after the city lost capital status, there were only 1,468,000 people living there. This sharp downturn continued. The census of August 1920 reported only 799,000 people in Petrograd, that is, not quite 35 percent of the prerevolutionary level.127
The cold, hungry city was dying, and many recalled the curse of Tsarina Eudoxia, the wife Peter the Great exiled to a convent: “Sankt-Peterburg will stand empty!”
