|
|
|
E-mail us: |
St. Petersburg
| |||||||||||||||||||||
|
In 1697, young Tsar Peter I – later officially designated "the Great" – journeyed to Holland and England to study Western technology and culture. He returned to Russia the following year determined to drag his backwards country into the modern world. One of his first orders of business was to build a powerful navy. |
||
Unfortunately, Russia was landlocked – Sweden blocked access to the Baltic Sea. Russian armies soon secured the mouth of the Neva River, where Peter founded a city in May 1703 bearing the name of his patron saint. Subsequent victories over the Swedes allowed the tsar to transfer the government from Moscow in 1712. |
|
Construction of St. Petersburg came at enormous cost. Peter ordered thousands of nobles, merchants, and artisans to relocate to the new capital. Labor was imported as well, as tens of thousands of peasants and prisoners-of-war opened Peter's "window on the West" – many at the cost of their own lives. |
| Peter's 18th-century successors – Anna, Elizabeth, and Catherine II – continued to expand and enrich the new capital. These tsarinas modeled their courts after their German and French counterparts, and embraced Baroque and Neo-Classical architecture. |
|
Russia's European capital naturally became a center of science and culture. During the 19th century, St. Petersburg was home to Alexander Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, and other cultural figures. |
||
|
By the turn of the 20th century, St. Petersburg was also a hotbed of radical activism. Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by anarchists in 1881, while a massacre of demonstrators sparked revolution in 1905. Revolution returned in 1917, bringing the Bolsheviks to power and the monarchy to an end. |
|
The Communists moved the capital of what would become the USSR to Moscow, renaming St. Petersburg – called Petrograd since World War I – after their late revolutionary leader. During World War II, Leningrad withstood a 900-day German siege, at a cost over 670,000 lives. |
|
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the people of the city voted to restore its original name – although the surrounding region retains the Leningrad designation. In the meantime, St. Petersburg has regained a bit of its former glory as Russia's "second capital" – especially since Vladimir Putin, a native of the city, gained the Russian presidency in 2000, and the city celebrated its 300th anniversary in 2003. |
UNESCO World Heritage Review:
Three Centuries of St. Petersburg
 |
Top Tourist Attractions: |
|
Click here for more St. Petersburg tourist information |
 |
Click here for more things to do in St. Petersburg |
This page was last updated 14 August 2005.
