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Hello, when he visited St. Petersburg in Russia in 1739, the Venetian art connoisseur Francesco Algarotti made an unflattering observation.

He said that the worth a ground less marshy, the building materials of better quality, and the inhabitants more pleasant, St. Petersburg said, would be surely one of the finest towns in the world.

That St. Petersburg now is among the finest towns in the world, indeed that it even exists, his testament to the unbending will of Peter the Great and his tsarist successes, especially Catherine the Great.

But St. Petersburg's also a testament to ideas of the Baroque and the Neoclassical, of enlightened progress, and above all of the belief that Russia, having faced east for so long, must turn its face towards the west.

Indeed, Algarotti also calls St. Petersburg a window through which Russia looks on Europe.

With me to discuss St. Petersburg, Artoni Kross, emeritus professor of St. Levonik studies at the University of Cambridge, Janet Hartley, professor of international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science,

and Simon Dixon, so Bernard Perse, professor of Russian history at University College London.

Simon Dixon, St. Petersburg was founded by Peter the Great. He came to Seoul power in Russia in 1696 when he was 24. Can you explain what his basic idea and vision were?

Well, Peter belonged to a generation of muskivites at the end of the 17th century, who dissatisfied with the passivity of the state that they inherited.

Muskivite by the end of the 17th century was quite good at repelling its principal rivals, and it was all right at keeping their amount of dynasty on the throne, which was quite an achievement really for it.

Their amount had been in pass in 1613 only, but it, Peter and his contemporaries realized that if they were to transform muskiv and make it capable of using productive power in the land, they'd have to make serious changes.

They'd have to take over east-west trade or all sorts of things they could do, but it required reform.

Now, those reforms, the story of the reforms he usually told as a secular story of borrowings from the west, and that's certainly true, but there's another side to it which Peter's image makers were very strong, and that was the vision of transfiguration, a change of the world, with the Tsar as a sort of messianic figure at the center of it.

So, Peter was very much had a vision of himself as predestined for greatness, and this vision of transfiguration led by this extraordinary person was all more believable because he was six foot seven tall, extraordinarily brutal and vigorous, and seemed to be quite capable of exerting change.

Now, the problem for him, of course, was that Moscow, as the capital city, didn't seem to be the right sort of place for this.

It looked both to his own generation and to foreign visitors at the time, pretty much as sort of medieval higgledy-pigulty, and so he began when he was on tour in the west in 1697, 1698, start thinking about ways of changing his environment.

That didn't mean to say that he already had in mind building a wonderful new capital in St. Petersburg that would become the window on the west that you've described.

That's really a much more contingent set of developments later, but it did mean that he started in his urban development by trying to transform Moscow itself, making the whole city much more regular, wider streets and so on.

Most listeners should be told that Moscow is entirely wooden at that time, and pray to a great number of fires, and he had good reason to hate Moscow, didn't he, Peter?

Yes, he hadn't enjoyed his time in Moscow as a youths, certainly, and he was nervous, of course, when he came back from the Grand Embassy in 1697, 98, that he was facing a revolt on the part of the guards.

And so you were certainly arguments for looking around for an alternative capital that could sort of symbolize this new great empire that he hoped to find, but he didn't necessarily look to St. Petersburg first.

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