From the moment of its founding, Petersburg was both a city and a symbol, a city where history veered into myth. That the city existed at all was largely the result of the will of a single, larger-than-life personality, the reforming tsar Peter I. In 1703 – in what subsequent historians and social commentators have understood as an act of enlightenment and of hubris, of inspired creation, ruthless vision, and poor planning – Peter decreed the foundation of a new imperial city on territory recently won from Sweden in the Great Northern War. Turning his back on what he regarded as backward and parochial Moscow, Peter, the first tsar to visit the West, built in the westernmost reaches of his empire, on the sea, where the Neva River empties into the Gulf of Finland. It was a remote and inhospitable site. The chill wind that blows in from the gulf intensifies the harsh winters and dismal autumns to be expected a mere six degrees of latitude south of the Arctic Circle. Under Peter's watch, the almost inaccessible swamps of the Neva delta claimed the lives of thousands of forced laborers, a fact that turned into the myth of a “city built on bones and tears.”