ST. PETERSBURG

From 1712 until 1918, St. Petersburg was the capital of the Russian Empire. Peter I (the Great) began the construction of the city as his "Window on the West" in 1703. During the subsequent three centuries, St. Petersburg was identified with the three major forces shaping Russian history: Westernization, industrialization, and revolution. The city was renamed Petrograd in 1914, at the beginning of World War I, because it sounded less German, was then named Leningrad after the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, and again became St. Petersburg in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. Confusingly, the surrounding region (oblast) is still known as Leningrad.

In the early twenty-first century, with a metropolitan population of 4.8 million people, St. Petersburg is the second-largest city in Russia and the fourth-largest in Europe (behind Moscow, London, and Berlin). It is also Russia's second-most important industrial center, having benefited from Soviet investment in heavy industry, research and development, military-industrial production, and military basing and training. The city is a major international port and tourist destination, with tourists flocking there in May and June for the legendary "White Nights," during which the sun seems to never set.

capital of the russian empire

Peter the Great seized control over the confluence of the Neva River and the Gulf of Finland from Sweden in 1703. Inspired by a visit to Amsterdam, he decided to build a major city on this barren marshland to better integrate Russia into Western Europe and secure a Baltic port. Thousands of peasants and prisoners-of-war were pressed into service to build the city's numerous canals and palaces. When the harsh climate combined with malaria to kill tens of thousands of them, their bodies were dumped into the construction sites, leading to St. Petersburg's nickname as the "city built on bones." Construction was hampered by floods, which also ravaged the city in 1777, 1824, 1924, and 1955.

Empress Elizabeth, Peter's daughter, improved upon her father's vision by commissioning European architects such as Bartolomeo Rastrelli to construct baroque landmarks, including Winter Palace, the Smolny Institute, and the palaces of Tsarskoe Selo. Catherine II (the Great) subsequently purchased the paintings, drawings, and other priceless artworks that are now the core of the Hermitage Museum's holdings. She also established the Russian Academy of Arts to further aesthetic production, and she commissioned the Pavlovsk Palace, the Hermitage, and the Tauride Palace, later the meeting place of the first Duma and the Provisional Government.

The city's remarkable transformation from swamp to showcase paralleled the emergence of Russia as a major European power, from Peter's 1709 victory over the Swedes at Poltava to Alexander I's 1814 arrival in Paris. The city came to represent precisely this change from isolation to European integration. Petersburg's growing symbolic dominance preoccupied the country's intelligentsia and nobility alike, with Tsar Nicholas I

complaining that "Petersburg is Russian but it is not Russia."

During the imperial era, Russia's leading politicians, intellectuals, and cultural figures were brought together by the major institutions based in St. Petersburg to generate events that vitally affected the life of every member of Russian society. The Decembrist uprising of 1825 culminated in Senate (now Decembrist) Square. In January 1905, Father Gapon led a peaceful march of workers and their families to the Winter Palace to petition the tsar; the resulting slaughter is remembered as Bloody Sunday. Following that tragedy, the workers of St. Petersburg became increasingly militant. Forced to live and work in squalor due to Russia's rapid forced industrialization, they began to protest and strike for improved conditions.

By the dawn of the twentieth century, the city was the fifth-largest in Europe, behind London, Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, and was widely viewed as representative of imperial Russia's new military and industrial might. But with industrialization there also emerged a surging revolutionary movement, and "Red Petrograd" soon became the "cradle of the Revolution."

under the soviets

With the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Nicholas II russified the capital city's name to Petrograd. In the early days of the war, the streets of Petrograd were filled with young men volunteering for military service. But as Russian losses mounted and the economy declined still further, Petrograd became the focus of anti-tsarist sentiment. The Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, founded in 1917 and modeled on a 1905 organization, was the most active. In March (February O.S.) 1917, workers struck and soldiers mutinied, leading to the eventual abdication of Nicholas II. A Provisional Government was installed, but constantly battled the Petrograd Soviet for control of the city. During the "July Days," the Soviet nearly succeeded in gaining power. On November 7 (October 25, O.S.), members of Trotsky's Red Guards stormed the Winter Palace, and the Provisional Government fled. For the next seventy-four years, the communists would control Russia.

The Soviet regime's shift of its seat of government to Moscow in March 1918 stripped Petrograd of many of its most creative and powerful institutions and prominent individuals. The city was renamed Leningrad after the death of Lenin in 1924. Its standing was further undermined by the December 1934 assassination of Leningrad Party leader Sergei Kirov in his office at the Smolny Institute, which precipitated Josef Stalin's mass purges. Mass graves containing the victims were still being discovered outside the city as recently as 2002.

World War II took a particularly heavy toll on Leningrad. For nine hundred days the Germans laid siege to the city, and there were anywhere from 700,000 to more than 1 million civilian deaths from attack and starvation. Although the Nazis never entered the city proper, they looted and burned many of the palaces in the environs, including Peterhof and the Catherine Palace.

During the post-Stalin era Leningrad was an important economic and intellectual center, though still trailing Moscow. Aside from Kirov, one of Leningrad's best-known political leaders was the rather ironically named Grigory Romanov. As first secretary of the Leningrad Oblast Party Committee from 1970 to 1983, Romanov encouraged production and scientific associations, as well as links among such groups to innovate and implement new technologies. As a result, Leningrad achieved enviable production levels. Romanov also made use of the city's extensive scientific establishment, linking the research and production sectors to improve production.

the post-soviet era

Although Romanov eschewed Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, other Leningrad leaders embraced the changes. Anatoly Sobchak was elected to the first USSR Congress of People's Deputies in 1989 and in 1991 became the city's first elected mayor. A major figure in Russia's democratic movement, Sobchak oversaw a difficult transition in his city. His resistance to the hardline August 1991 putsch was critical to its defeat. Following the coup's collapse, Sobchak immediately renamed the city St. Petersburg. As the city's economy suffered under the national shift to capitalism, St. Petersburg experienced a severe rise in organized crime. Sobchak was unable to eradicate corruption, and in 1996 lost his bid for reelection to Vladmir Yakovlev.

St. Petersburg is the cultural capital of Russia. Among its most famous residents were the painters Marc Chagall and Ilya Repin; the writers Nikolai Gogol, Alexander Pushkin, Anna Akhmatova, and Fyodor Dostoevsky; the composers Peter Tchaikovsky and Dmitry Shoshtakovich; and the choreographers Marius Petipa and Sergei Diaghilev. Among its many art galleries, the Hermitage, the Russian Museum, and the Stieglitz boast collections unparalleled in the world. St. Petersburg is the home of the renowned Mariinsky ballet company (known as the Kirov in Soviet times). Shostakovich named his Seventh Symphony Leningrad. Falconet's Bronze Horseman sculpture of Peter the Great, located in Decembrist Square, was commissioned by Catherine the Great and immortalized by Pushkin in a poem of the same name. Many palaces and Orthodox churches have been restored, including the Romanovs' Winter Palace, St. Isaac's Cathedral, and the Kazan Cathedral. On the north bank of the Neva, the Peter and Paul Fortress has a long history as both a prison and, in the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, the burial site of all the Romanov tsars from Peter I to Nicholas II.

St. Petersburg had begun to recapture some its lost splendor by 2003. UNESCO designated the city a World Heritage site. Extensive renovation, funded in part by a $31 million loan from the World Bank, took place in preparation for the city's tercentennial celebration in May 2003. Partly contributing to the city's renaissance was the fact that President Vladimir Putin was born in St. Petersburg. In addition to promoting the tercentennial commemoration, Putin oversaw the renovation of the Peterhof Palace into a world-class conference center. There was also talk of creating a presidential residence in St. Petersburg and even some sentiment to move the capital from Moscow. Whether or not St. Petersburg regains the political eminence of a century ago, it remains a vibrant, culturally rich European city, much as Peter envisioned.

See also: academy of arts; admiralty; bloody sunday; catherine ii; decembrist movement and rebellion; elizabeth; museum, hermitage; peter i; peter and paul fortress; winter palace

bibliography

Glantz, David M. (2002). The Battle for Leningrad, 1941–1944. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press.

McAuley, Mary. (1991). Bread and Justice: State and Society in Petrograd, 1917–1922. New York: Oxford University Press.

McKean, Robert B. (1990). St. Petersburg between the Revolutions, June 1907–February 1917. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Ruble, Blair A. (1989). Leningrad: Shaping a Soviet City. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sablinsky, Walter. (1976). The Road to Bloody Sunday: Father Gapon and the St. Petersburg Massacre of 1905. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Salisbury, Harrison E. (1969). The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad. New York: Harper & Row.

Ann E. Robertson

Blair A. Ruble