Saint Petersburg figures in the book as both an instrument of Russian state-building and a point of departure for the country’s limited early railway network. Peter the Great made the new capital part of a campaign to centralize authority; in the nineteenth century, a seventeen-mile railway connected it to nearby imperial residences, even as officials argued that railways would encourage socially dangerous mobility.

A capital for centralization

Between 1682 and his death in 1725, Peter the Great built Saint Petersburg as a new capital and used the project of political centralization to strip power from the old aristocracy, the Boyars. He sought to establish a modern bureaucratic state and army, abolishing the Boyar Duma that had previously made him tsar. The city thus appears not simply as a seat of government but as part of a reordering of political authority toward the ruler. Peter reinforced that concentration of power through the Table of Ranks, a new social hierarchy organized around service to the tsar, and by taking control of the Church. The book compares this intervention with Henry VIII’s use of control over the Church during the centralization of the English state, while distinguishing the political result in Russia: power was redirected toward Peter himself.

Conflict over the new order

Centralization provoked opposition from groups whose authority it threatened. Peter’s military reforms prompted the traditional royal guards, the Streltsy, to rebel; further revolts, including those of the Bashkirs in Central Asia and the Bulavin Rebellion, also failed. The city’s place in Peter’s project is therefore connected to a broader contest over who would command the state, rather than to urban growth alone. The book contrasts this Russian outcome with England, where Tudor-era centralization helped produce demands for voice and representation among local elites and ultimately enabled stronger parliamentary institutions. In Russia, Peter’s centralizing effort instead strengthened absolutism. Saint Petersburg’s creation belongs to that institutional divergence: a new capital and administrative order helped consolidate state power, but political authority accrued to the tsar rather than becoming more pluralistic.

Railways and the fear of mobility

By 1842 Russia had only one railway: the Tsarskoe Selo Railway, which ran seventeen miles from Saint Petersburg to the imperial residences at Tsarskoe Selo and Pavlovsk. The limited line illustrates the gap between the railway expansion taking place in Britain and much of northwest Europe and the hesitancy of Russian officials to promote such infrastructure. The finance minister Kankrin opposed railway construction because he regarded mobility as socially dangerous and questioned whether railways met a genuine need. He turned down numerous proposals. A line linking Saint Petersburg and Moscow was not built until 1851, and Count Kleinmichel, who headed the main administration of Transport and Public Buildings, continued to discourage construction and, after 1849, used his authority to censor newspaper discussion of railway development.

A strategic liability

The policy against railway expansion was reversed only after Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War of 1853–1856 made the shortcomings of its transportation network a serious concern for national security. In 1870, while Britain and much of northwest Europe were crisscrossed by railways, few lines penetrated Russia’s vast territory. Saint Petersburg’s early railway connection to imperial residences consequently stands in contrast to the slow development of a broader network—and to the eventual recognition that restricting that development carried strategic costs.