Saint Petersburg

• 1. Introduction

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  Saint Petersburg sits at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea, and on the 27th of May 1703, Tsar Peter the Great laid its founding stone on an island he had just wrested from Sweden. He named the city after the apostle Saint Peter, and yet he never settled on a single spelling of that name, using at least two different versions in his own letters. What Peter did settle was a grand ambition: to give Russia a window to Europe, a seaport that would not freeze shut each winter the way the existing port at Arkhangelsk did. The city he built on swamp and river delta, using the labour of conscripted serfs and Swedish prisoners of war, would go on to serve as the capital of the Russian Empire for more than two centuries. It would survive a siege historians describe as the most lethal in modern history. It would change its name four times. And today it stands as the fourth-most populous city in Europe and the world's northernmost city with more than one million residents. How a patch of marshy land at sixty degrees north latitude became one of the great cities of the world is a story of royal ambition, architectural audacity, revolutionary violence, and extraordinary survival.

• 2. Born on Stolen Ground

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  Swedish colonists built the fortress of Nyenskans at the mouth of the Neva River in 1611. The small settlement of Nyen grew up around it, and before that the area had been home to Finnic Izhorian and Votian peoples. Peter the Great stormed and captured that fortress during the Great Northern War, then moved closer to the Gulf of Finland itself. On an island called Zayachy, meaning Hare Island, he laid the foundations of the Peter and Paul Fortress, which became the first brick and stone structure of the new city. The city was built by conscripted peasants from across Russia, with Swedish prisoners of war also lending forced labour in some years under the supervision of Alexander Menshikov. Tens of thousands of serfs died in the construction. Despite the human cost, the city developed fast. Within a few years it was growing around Trinity Square on the right bank of the Neva. By 1716, the Swiss-Italian architect Domenico Trezzini had drawn up a plan to make the city centre on Vasilyevsky Island, shaped by a rectangular grid of canals. Though the canal plan was not completed, its influence remains visible in the layout of streets today. In that same year, Peter appointed Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Alexandre Le Blond as the city's chief architect, and the style known as Petrine Baroque took hold. Peter moved the capital from Moscow to Saint Petersburg in 1712, before the war that prompted the city's founding had even ended. He had been calling it the seat of government as early as 1704.

• 3. Empires of Stone and Fire

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  Catastrophic fires swept through the city in 1736 and 1737, and a committee under Burkhard Christoph von Münnich responded by ordering an entirely new plan for the damaged boroughs. The city was carved into five districts, and the centre shifted to the Admiralty borough, where three radial streets converged at the Admiralty building itself. One of those streets, Nevsky Prospekt, became the main avenue of the city. Baroque architecture dominated the first six decades of the city's life, culminating in the Elizabethan Baroque style associated with Italian architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli, who designed the Winter Palace. In the 1760s, neoclassical architecture succeeded Baroque. The Commission of Stone Buildings, established in 1762, ruled that no structure in the city could exceed the height of the Winter Palace, and it prohibited gaps between buildings. During Catherine the Great's reign, the banks of the Neva were lined with granite embankments, though it was not until 1850 that the first permanent bridge across the Neva, the Annunciation Bridge, was permitted to open. Before that, only pontoon bridges crossed the river. The list of architects who shaped the city across the neoclassical and Empire periods reads like a roll call of Europe: Jean-Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe, Giacomo Quarenghi, Carlo Rossi, and Auguste de Montferrand, who designed both Saint Isaac's Cathedral and the Alexander Column. In 1825, the Decembrist revolt against Nicholas I was suppressed on Senate Square, a day after Nicholas assumed the throne. When Alexander II emancipated the serfs in 1861, a wave of former peasants flooded the capital, and the city grew into one of the largest industrial cities in Europe, complete with a major naval base at Kronstadt and a seaport on the Baltic.

• 4. The Name and Its Many Lives

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  Peter the Great never issued a formal naming document when he renamed the site after Saint Peter in June 1703. His own letters used diverse spellings, one emulating German and one emulating Dutch, reflecting the fact that Peter was multilingual and an admirer of the Netherlands. Over time the name was normalized to Sankt-Peterburg in Russian. An older English spelling, Saint Petersburgh, survives in the name of a street in London's Bayswater district, near St Sophia's Cathedral, a remnant of a visit the Tsar made to London in 1814. The first general governor of the city, Menshikov, may have coined the city's first nickname, Petri. In 1740, Mikhail Lomonosov used a Russified Greek form, Petropol. In the early 19th century, the Slavicised variant Petrograd appeared in the work of Alexander Pushkin. That name became official policy on the 1st of September 1914, when Tsar Nicholas II ordered the city renamed Petrograd to strip out the German words. The change also quietly shifted the city's symbolic patron from Saint Peter the apostle to Peter the Great, the founder. On the 26th of January 1924, five days after the death of Vladimir Lenin, the city was renamed again: Leningrad, meaning Lenin City. Decades later, a citywide referendum held on the 12th of June 1991 returned the original name, with 55% of voters choosing Saint Petersburg and 43% supporting Leningrad. The change took official effect on the 6th of September 1991. The surrounding oblast, however, kept the name Leningrad. Residents today often call the city simply Piter.

• 5. Siege and Symphony

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  German forces began their siege of Leningrad on the 8th of September 1941, following the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union. It lasted 872 days, ending on the 27th of January 1944. More than one million civilians died, the majority from starvation. The only supply route in or out was the Road of Life across Lake Ladoga, which could not function until the lake froze. Around 2,000 residents were arrested for cannibalism. The city was largely depopulated; from a population of three million at the siege's start, fewer than 600,000 remained by the end of 1943. Dmitri Shostakovich, who was born and raised in Saint Petersburg, wrote his Seventh Symphony while based in the city during those months. He dedicated it to Leningrad and it is still called the Leningrad Symphony. The work premiered in Samara in March 1942. A few months later, it received its first performance in besieged Leningrad at the Bolshoy Philharmonic Hall, conducted by Karl Eliasberg, and was broadcast over the radio. Survivors said it lifted their spirits. In 1992, the Seventh Symphony was performed by the 14 surviving players from the Leningrad premiere, in the same hall, half a century later. On the 1st of May 1945, Joseph Stalin named Leningrad a hero city of the war in his Supreme Commander Order No. 20. The formal law acknowledging that honorary title passed on the 8th of May 1965, the 20th anniversary of victory, and the Hero-City Obelisk bearing the Gold Star sign was installed in April 1985.

• 6. City of Culture and Canvas

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  The Hermitage Museum, housed in and around the former Winter Palace, is one of the largest art museums in the world. Alongside it, the city holds 221 museums, 2,000 libraries, more than 80 theatres, 100 concert organizations, 45 galleries, 62 cinemas, and 80 other cultural establishments. Saint Petersburg's loss of capital-city status after 1918 paradoxically preserved its architecture: major prestige building projects went to Moscow, leaving the 18th and 19th-century cityscape of Saint Petersburg largely intact. The Saint Petersburg Conservatory, founded in 1862 by pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein, trained Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Alexander Borodin, and Dmitri Shostakovich, who taught there in the 1960s. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov taught at the conservatory from 1871 to 1905; his students included Igor Stravinsky, and his former apartment has been preserved as the only museum dedicated to him. In literature, Dostoyevsky called Saint Petersburg the most abstract and intentional city in the world. Joseph Brodsky, who grew up there and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987, wrote essays about the city from exile in the United States, including a piece titled "A Guide to a Renamed City". The Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet has trained generations of dancers, among them Rudolf Nureyev, Natalia Makarova, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. In 1972, Boris Grebenshchikov founded the band Aquarium in the city. The 1980s brought the Leningrad Rock Club, which hosted DDT, Kino, and Alisa, among others. The Kunstkamera, whose collection was established by Peter the Great in 1714, is sometimes described as the first museum in Russia.

• 7. The Skyline Debate

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  Regulations in Saint Petersburg forbid tall buildings in the city centre. Until the early 2010s, only three skyscrapers had been built, and all stood far from the historic core: Leader Tower at 140 m, Alexander Nevsky at 124 m, and Atlantic City at 105 m. The Saint Petersburg TV Tower, constructed in 1962, stood 310 m and was for decades the city's tallest structure. A plan called the Okhta Center proposed a 396 m supertall skyscraper, and in 2008 the World Monuments Fund placed the Saint Petersburg historic skyline on its list of the 100 most endangered sites because of the threat it posed. The Okhta Center was cancelled at the end of 2010, after President Dmitry Medvedev intervened. The project was then relocated to Lakhta, a historical area northwest of the city centre. The renamed Lakhta Center commenced construction in 2012. Its main tower reaches 462.5 m, making it the tallest skyscraper in Russia and in Europe. The Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg is a UNESCO World Heritage Site encompassing 36 historical architectural complexes and around 4,000 individual monuments. After 2005, demolition of older buildings in the centre was permitted, making heritage preservation increasingly contentious. In 2018, Saint Petersburg received over 15 million tourists, a figure that reflects the city's standing as the northernmost major metropolis in the world and a unique reserve of European architectural styles spanning three centuries.