"The Tsar Carpenter" Monument

On the Admiralty Embankment, next to the Admiralty building, stands a bronze figure of the young Peter the Great holding an axe — the monument known as "The Tsar Carpenter." It depicts an episode from the life of the future emperor, who, under an assumed name, learned shipbuilding at Dutch shipyards. The present sculpture is not the first to stand on this spot: the monument has had a complicated history, linking two countries and two centuries.

The author of the composition was the sculptor Leopold Bernstamm, who lived and worked mainly in France and was considered a favorite artist of Nicholas II. Among his works dedicated to the reformer tsar was a plaster model titled "Peter I Learning Shipbuilding in Saardam," shown to the emperor during a visit to Paris. The model pleased him so much that Nicholas II ordered it cast in bronze in two copies at once — one for St. Petersburg, the other as a gift to the Dutch town of Zaandam, where Peter had indeed once worked as a carpenter.

The first St. Petersburg version was installed on the Admiralty Embankment in June 1910; the pedestals, shaped like jagged granite cliffs, were designed by the architect Alexander von Hohen. The second casting was ceremonially unveiled on the old Dam Square in Zaandam in March 1911, and two years later a smaller copy was placed in the Summer Garden opposite the Swan Canal. The figure is executed in a realistic manner: the young tsar, in simple working clothes, bends over an unfinished boat with a tool in his hands — an image far removed from the customary formal iconography of monarchs.

The monument's appearance provoked sharp controversy: artists of the "World of Art" group, led by Alexandre Benois, found the sculpture petty and fussy against the backdrop of the embankment's majestic architecture, while the historian Vladimir Kurbatov went so far as to call it "an unsightly lump of bronze" in front of the Admiralty arch. The disputes did not stop the monument from standing until the revolution: at the end of 1918, as part of Lenin's program of monumental propaganda, both of Bernstamm's St. Petersburg monuments were dismantled as lacking artistic value. The copy in the Summer Garden was destroyed in 1930, and the same fate at various times befell other monuments to Peter by Bernstamm — in Peterhof and Vyborg — which were later restored as well.

The present-day sculpture on the embankment is an exact copy of the Zaandam original, presented to the city by the government of the Netherlands in 1996 to mark the tercentenary of Peter's journey to Holland. The bronze figure was delivered to St. Petersburg aboard a warship of the Royal Netherlands Navy, and on 7 September 1996 it was installed on a new pedestal designed by the architect Fyodor Romanovsky and the artist Ivan Uralov — now closer to the Admiralty's eastern pavilion. The opening ceremony was conducted by the Crown Prince of the Netherlands, Willem-Alexander.

Today "The Tsar Carpenter" remains one of the recognizable monuments on the Neva embankment and a reminder of the Dutch chapter of Peter's reforms. The story of its destruction and restoration makes the monument a symbol of the changeable fate of St. Petersburg's monumental culture.