Great Port of Saint Petersburg

• 1. Introduction

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  The Great Port of Saint Petersburg stretches across 616.93 square kilometres of water on the western edge of Russia's second city, where the Neva River fans out into the Gulf of Finland. Its berthing front runs 21.7 kilometres, lined with 147 berths that handle everything from crude oil to scrap metal. Ships with drafts of up to 13 metres ride into the port through a canal that was dug, at enormous cost and personal sacrifice, by one man in the nineteenth century. Who was that man? How did a mathematician-turned-entrepreneur reshape the geography of a great imperial city? And how did a port born in the reign of Tsar Alexander II survive revolution, blockade, and the collapse of the Soviet Union to become one of the busiest terminals on the Baltic?

• 2. Nikolay Putilov's Canal

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  Nikolay Putilov was born in 1820. By the time he turned his attention to Saint Petersburg's waterfront in 1869, he had already co-founded the Obukhov factory and founded the Putilov factory, making him one of the most consequential industrialists in imperial Russia. He was also a naval officer, a mathematician, an engineer, and a metallurgist, and it was this rare combination of skills that equipped him to tackle a project most thought impossible: cutting a 32-kilometre sea canal from Kronstadt to the heart of Saint Petersburg.

  On the 13th of June 1874, Tsar Alexander II approved a provision called "On the Temporary Administration of the St. Petersburg Sea." The general direction of the channel received Alexander's approval on the 21st of August of the same year. Then, on the 26th of October, a contract for the production of works and supplies on the Saint Petersburg Canal was signed. Putilov, described in the contract as acting "with his comrades," took charge of the works.

  Putilov did not live to see the result. His sudden death interrupted the project, and it fell to his companions and to S. P. Maksimovich, assisted by a Finland Swedish engineer, to carry it through to completion. On the 15th of May 1885, the 32-kilometre channel opened to ship traffic, and a new Maritime Trade Port opened alongside it. The man who started it all was buried, at his own request, on the bank of the Ekateringofka River on Gladky Island, within sight of his factory, his port, and the Morskoy Canal.

• 3. A Builder's Afterlife

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  Architect F. S. Kharlamov designed the chapel that stood over Putilov's grave on Gladky Island. That resting place did not last. In 1907, his remains were moved to the crypt of St. Nicholas Church on what is today Stacheks Avenue. That church had been built by architect V. A. Kosyakov between 1901 and 1906. Then, in 1951, the grave was destroyed.

  Putilov's physical memorial was erased, but the infrastructure he willed into existence proved far more durable. The canal he built became the backbone of a port that would one day handle tens of millions of tonnes of cargo each year, serving a city that Putilov himself had helped transform into an industrial power.

• 4. The Port's Geography

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  The central unit of the port sits on and around the islands of the Neva River Delta, in the Nevsky Lip of the eastern part of the Gulf of Finland, which is itself an arm of the Baltic Sea. Within that sprawling footprint, the port is not a single facility but a collection of distinct operations: berths for maritime trade, a forest port, a fish port, a river port, an oil terminal, shipbuilding and ship repair yards, a sea passenger terminal, a river passenger terminal, piers at Kronstadt and Lomonosov, and the Gorskaya and Bronka facilities. All of these are tied together by an extensive system of channels and fairways.

  The sea trade port alone contains about 200 berths with depths of up to 11.9 metres. It is divided into four districts. The first and second districts are served by the New Port railway station; the third and fourth by Avtovo. The container terminal occupies berths 82 through 87, accepting both container ships and roll-on/roll-off vessels. The port fleet supporting all of this includes more than twenty tugs of various capacities, along with icebreakers, oil harvesters, water cannons, pilot boats, fireboats, and barges.

• 5. Cargo and Commerce

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  Oil products, metals, forest products, containers, coal, ore, chemical cargoes, and scrap metal all move through Saint Petersburg's port. The range speaks to a city that serves simultaneously as a resource corridor, a manufacturing hub, and an international gateway.

  The cargo figures across the twentieth century tell a story of disruption and recovery. In 1913 the port handled 7.3 million tonnes. By 1940 that figure had fallen to 3.18 million tonnes, and by 1945, at the end of the siege of Leningrad, throughput had collapsed to just 0.79 million tonnes. Recovery was slow: 1.37 million tonnes in 1950, 6.3 million in 1960. By 1980 the port had reached 12.2 million tonnes. The transition years of the late Soviet period pushed the figure to 20.5 million tonnes in 1997, and by 2000 it stood at 32 million tonnes. The port hit a modern peak of 61.2 million tonnes in 2014, then pulled back to 51.5 million in 2015 and 48.6 million in 2016. Tonnage recovered again through the latter part of the decade, reaching 59.9 million tonnes in 2019.

  In January and February 2016 alone, cargo turnover came to 7.5 million tonnes, a figure that was down 7.0 percent compared to the same two months in 2015. The main stevedoring companies handling this traffic include the Seaport of St. Petersburg, NEVA-METALL, Baltic Bulker Terminal, Moby Dick LLC, St. Petersburg Petroleum Terminal, First Container Terminal, and Petrolesport. Since 2011, oversight of commercial navigation in and around the port has rested with the Port Authority of the Great Port of St. Petersburg, a state-owned federal agency whose responsibility extends beyond the port itself to designated areas of the Russian Federation. The Bronka deepwater port, one of the newer facilities within the port's composition, points toward the continued expansion of the port's capacity on the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland.