History of St. Petersburg’s Pavements

Abstract

Within the article, the author examines the history of everyday life of St. Petersburg through analyzing documents that have recorded the history of the city’s pavement replacement with various materials over a period of more than three hundred years. The study was mainly carried out on the basis of archival materials from the funds of the Central State Historical Archive of St. Petersburg and the Russian State Historical Archive. It is evident that this work is the first comprehensive study of the history of the pavements of the Russian Empire capital as a theme, a topic which has not yet been adequately reflected in either domestic or foreign historiography. It has been established that it took the city authorities a considerable time to pave the capital's roads during the imperial period. The paving of the city roads developed from the use of raw stone to natural asphalt. In the end, it took almost a century to bring the streets of the main part of the city to the proper condition; they have been previously been covered with mainly stone. Whereas in the XVIII century the main task of the central and city authorities was to pave as many streets as possible, then in the XIX - early XX centuries the city government instead concentrated on a way find an inexpensive but durable material for this purpose.