“It’s empty for St. Petersburg,” prophesied many blessed ones, both from St. Petersburg and from Russia.
For the first time, this gloomy spell was uttered by Evdokia Lopukhina, the first wife of Peter I, mother of Tsarevich Alexei. Peter did not live with her for long and quickly moved to the German settlement to Anna Mons. While his mother was alive, he maintained the appearance of marriage, but after the death of Natalya Kirillovna in 1694, Peter left for Arkhangelsk and even stopped maintaining correspondence with his wife. And in 1697, while at the Grand Embassy in London, he instructed his associates to persuade the queen to take a haircut as a nun, which was then the equivalent of divorce. Evdokia did not agree, and upon his return from abroad, Peter, when his persuasions did not give anything, on September 23, 1698 sent the queen to the Suzdal-Pokrovsky monastery under escort. Having learned about her husband's new hobby - the construction of the city, - the former queen angrily threw: "This place is empty!" This fact is documented. In the testimony of Tsarevich Alexei under investigation (dated February 8, 1718), there is the following: “She also said that Pieterburch would not stand up to us:“He is empty, he is; many say about this””. Indeed, too many have talked about it.
Later, in 1722, there was a vision in the St. Petersburg Trinity Cathedral, rumors of which quickly filled the city.
This is how Alexei Tolstoy describes this real story in "Walking through the agony": "Back in the time of Peter the Great, a sexton from the Trinity Church, who now stands near the Trinity Bridge, descending from the bell tower, in the dark, saw a kikimora - a thin woman and a simple-haired woman - very got scared and then shouted in the tavern: "Petersburg, they say, be empty" - for which he was seized, tortured in the Secret Chancellery and beaten with a whip mercilessly. " In The Day of Peter, he writes: “- Your Majesty, the case of the sexton Gultyaev, that in the past month at the Trinity on the bell tower of the kikimora saw and said:“Peterburgh will be empty”, dismantled, all witnesses have been interrogated, it remains for your Majesty to put a resolution. - I know, I remember, - answered Peter, blowing a puff of smoke. - Gultyaeva, stupid so as not to chatter, to beat with a whip and to hard labor for a year. Only one thing the writer was wrong:who received the vision of a kikimora was sentenced to three years in hard labor.
Another legend is given by Dmitry Merezhkovsky in his novel Alexander the First: “The old people say - on the St. Petersburg side, near the Trinity, the alder grew tall, and there was such water here, ten years before the city was built, that the alder was flooded from the top, and it was then divination: as the second water will be the same, then St. Petersburg will end, and this place will be empty. And Tsar Emperor Peter Alekseevich, as they knew about that, they ordered to cut down the alder, and to execute the people who prophesy without mercy. But only that word is true, according to the Scripture: when he did not see, the water came and was taken all …"
But the riot of the elements did not manage to wipe Petersburg off the face of the earth. A major flood did occur in 1691. Swedish chronicles say that the entire area of the central part of the future city was hidden by water at twenty-five feet in height (7.62 meters).
It should be noted that in St. Petersburg the first flood happened already three months after its foundation: on the night of August 19-20, 1703. The water then rose more than 2 meters. Another thing happened three years later, in 1706. Peter I then wrote to Alexander Menshikov: “It was three days ago that the wind west-south-west overtook such water, which, they say, never happened. I had 21 inches on top of the floor in my mansion (almost 54 centimeters. - Approx. Auth.), And boats freely rode around the city and on the other side of the street. However, it did not last long, less than three hours. And it was very comforting to see that people were sitting on the roofs and trees, as if during a flood … The water, although it was extremely great, did not make a big trouble”.
But the largest in the history of St. Petersburg was the flood on November 7 (19), 1824, when the water rose by 421 centimeters. The newspaper “Russian Invalid or Voennye Vedomosti” wrote: “In the disastrous flood, Galernaya Harbor, Vasilievsky Island and the Petersburg side suffered more than any other part of St. Petersburg. On Nevsky Prospect, water reached Troitsky Lane (now Rubinstein Street). Further, to the Banner, on Sands and on Liteinaya, it did not pour out into the streets. Mokhovaya and Troitsky Lane were its extreme borders. The settlements near Yekateringof and the state-owned iron works suffered in a terrible way. Several hundred people and all livestock died there. Almost all wooden buildings, just like in the Galernaya harbor, have been demolished or destroyed by water …”In total, 324 floods occurred in the three hundred years of city history. But the floods did not succeed in devastating Northern Palmyra. People succeeded in this much more than the elements.
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Many times they wanted to kill Petersburg, exterminate, sweep away from the face of the earth. The first time this happened shortly after its foundation: in 1728, Peter's grandson, Peter II, again moved the capital to Moscow, and Northern Palmyra began to empty out, decline and simply collapse. In two short years, Petrine paradise fell into complete desolation. But, fortunately, Anna Ioannovna already in 1730 returned the capital to the banks of the Neva.
The next time St. Petersburg was depopulated in the Civil. Having lost the status of the capital, Petrograd was empty, and the artist Annenkov, for example, recalled that even the tram tracks in the city center were overgrown with weeds. There are similar memories of crumbling St. Petersburg and in many other memoirs. Then again they remembered the old prophecy that the city would be empty.
No one could have imagined that the city would come to life again, and then almost die - in the blockade. Then the city, which had not been killed by the Germans, began to grind in its millstones the Stalinist repressive machine. First, they took up culture, and a decree was issued about the magazines "Zvezda" and "Leningrad". Then the so-called. The "Leningrad affair" … In fact, the repressive destruction of not Leningrad, but St. Petersburg, began a decade earlier, back in the thirties, after the assassination of Kirov. Then the Soviet government decided to get rid of the "unreliable element", to destroy the last traces of the imperial capital in "Red Leningrad". Leningraders, who lived in communal apartments at that time, recalled that sometimes half of the rooms in large apartments were sealed, and their former tenants counted their days at Kresty.
In 1935 alone, following the murder of Kirov, 39,660 people were evicted from Leningrad and the Leningrad Region, and 24,374 people were sentenced to various punishments. The sites of the Rzhev artillery range near the villages of Staroye Kovaleve, Berngardovka and Toksovo, and city cemeteries served as places of secret burials in unmarked mass graves. The largest such cemetery, the Levashovskaya Wasteland, contains the bodies of more than 46 thousand people who were shot from 1937 to 1954. 40 485 of them were rehabilitated and 6286 were not rehabilitated.