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This article explores the 1824 flood in St. Petersburg by focusing on the state response to the flood that presented it as a tragic and natural outcome of constructing a city in a harsh environment. Paternal care elicited support for the regime. However, conquest of nature was central to the autocratic authority and the flood challenged that authority. Granite embankments were the primary symbol of power over nature, yet they failed to stop rising waters in 1824. Engineers offered modern solutions to replace embankments, but granite was essential to the architectural facade even as the population lost faith in granite’s ability to protect the city. The urban and environmental perspective demonstrates the limits of autocratic authority. Tarnished by the flood, the state solicited modern solutions that remained unfulfilled. Ultimately, cost and alteration of the imperial façade proved too much of a price to bear to prevent flood. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although legitimately associated with a crisis of faith and the rapid spread of atheistic-socialism, the revolutionary period 1905-1918 in St. Petersburg/Petrograd can and should also be understood as one of unprecedented religious experimentation and spiritual growth, even among the working classes. Rejecting overly simplistic notions of “secularization” and de-Christianization, this article offers a necessarily fluid and pluralistic portrait of Petersburg religious culture, the contours of which were shaped by tensions between rural and urban practices, popular and official institutions, and competing notions of the sacred and the profane in the city’s increasingly diverse marketplace of beliefs. It examines the new and varied demands that working-class believers voiced with respect to the role of the Orthodox faith and Church in their lives and investigates urban Orthodoxy as it was “lived,” including changes and continuities in religious practice, sacramental life, icon worship, and pilgrimage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]