Pollution and Industrialization of the Neva and Viennese Danube in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Rapidly growing cities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were full of environmental risks and problems. They were often overcrowded, industrialized, and equipped with quite primitive sanitary technologies. Urban dwellers used to dump their waste into their rivers. During the first decades of the nineteenth century, urban populations started to consider pollution a problem. In this section we describe similarities and differences in the history of water supply, pollution, and waste management in St. Petersburg and Vienna. Both cities faced similar problems, though St. Petersburg used the Neva as a source of drinking water while Vienna started to tap Alpine rivers as sources of drinking water in the 1870s.

Switch between the Neva and Danube perspectives by clicking on the circles below.​

The original virtual exhibition includes the option to switch between the cities St. Petersburg and Vienna within the individual chapters.

Pollution and industrialization of the Neva in St. Petersburg

A policeman warns a drowning person that he shouldn’t drink the water—as if this were a greater danger than drowning. Caricature from the journal Satirikon, 1908. Illustration by Re Mi.

The water of the Neva is naturally of excellent quality and the people of St. Petersburg were accustomed to enjoying pure and fresh drinking water from the city’s beginnings. Moreover the river has very strong currents and it was therefore able to clean all sorts of waste for some time. But the growing city eventually became a problem too great even for such a large body of water. This was even more true for the smaller branches and canals.

The network of rivers and canals was considered to be a perfect natural sewage system by the dwellers of St. Petersburg. All the city’s waste, including the dwellers’ excrement, was collected in sinkholes and a significant part of it was ultimately discharged into the rivers and canals due to a quite primitive system of waste management. The city police struggled against this habit tirelessly but unsuccessfully. Several times in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the city administration cleaned the small rivers and canals, but still the water quality there was considered rather poor in comparison to the Neva. The water of the main river channel in the city, on the contrary, had a superb reputation throughout the entire eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century. Even the imperial residence, the Winter Palace, to say nothing about ordinary citizens, was supplied with water directly from the Neva without any purification during this period. A legend (which is definitely not true) says that Empress Alexandra Fedorovna (the wife of Nikolas II) used to exclusively drink the water of the Neva and allegedly even required this water to be delivered to her in barrels when she was traveling inside and even outside Russia. In general, the Petersburgers used a lot of water due to their habit of frequently visiting public baths, which was normal even for the poorest people.

The original virtual exhibition includes an interactive gallery of images. View the images on the following pages.

The rivers also became an important part of industrial infrastructure. Industrialization in the modern sense of the word started in St. Petersburg in the late eighteenth century. Since the early period of the city’s history, the downstream stretch of the Neva had been used for storage, piers, and wharfs, including the Admiralty shipyard. It is therefore very understandable that this area became one of the city’s earliest industrial zones. Later, plants and factories also occupied the Neva’s banks upstream from the city center, as well as the northern coast of the Big Nevka and the banks of the Obvodnyi Canal. The Neva’s water was used in all stages of the technological process and the waste produced, together with the dirty water, was ultimately dropped into the rivers and canals.

Billboard of the Company for the Health of the Cities, early twentieth century. The company “For the Healthy Cities” was involved in the construction and management of water cleaning and sewage systems. It is worth noting the proposal to erect buildings that required special water treatment technologies: laundries, hospitals, schools, markets, butcheries, ice storage, etc. Unknown illustrator.

As a result, as early as the 1830s even the Neva—to say nothing about the smaller rivers and canals—was rather dirty, much worse than its reputation. In 1831 cholera came to St. Petersburg for the first time and some residents accused Polish rebels of poisoning the water of the Neva as the river itself could absolutely not be dangerous in their eyes. But in reality the water became more and more dangerous, and cholera became one of the capital’s major problems until the twentieth century.

The purification of the water in the city became one of the most discussed issues in the journals and newspapers. Public concern about the pollution of the city in general and of the water in particular was very visible. Sanitary technologies were demanded and became the basis for a specific branch of business. A public water supply system was introduced in the 1860s, but it was only in the 1870s that the first water filtration system appeared. It was quite primitive and the companies providing additional water purification found a large market in St. Petersburg in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The problem of waste water was even harder. The first plans for a more-or-less modern sewage system were drawn up by the engineer Griboyedov in 1912, but it was not completed because of the First World War and the Revolution. A sewage system was not constructed until the Soviet era, although the problem of waste water in St. Petersburg continues to this day.

 

Switch between the Neva and Danube perspectives by clicking on the circles above.