Saint Petersburg History

The statue of the Bronze Horseman depicts a strident Peter the Great atop a rearing horse. His finger is thrust forward, pointing out the city's glorious history. St Petersburg's beginnings are inseparable from the historically and physically huge figure of Tsar Peter. Ambitious, optimistic and uncompromising, he conceived of this northern capital while still at war with Charles II of Sweden. St Petersburg was to be both a "window to Europe" and a progressive antidote to the conservative and backward Holy Russia (symbolized by the city of Moscow) which Peter hated so intensely. For a while, Peter lived rough (by Tsarist standards) in a log cabin known as Peter's Cabin in order to personally oversee the construction of the Peter and Paul Fortress—the city's first major building.

Building a city in such harsh physical conditions proved difficult: countless prisoners-of-war carved the city out of marshland in unimaginably torrid conditions. Thousands perished as a result.

When Peter finally defeated the Swedes at Poltava in 1709, a future for St Petersburg was secured. By 1712, construction was well underway and the Imperial family and much of the government had transferred to this strange new city, still afflicted by the threat of flood and the danger of marauding wolves.

Peter died in 1725, having given Russia an ambitious new capital and, incidentally, a radically redesigned Russian state. In Petersburg itself we can thank Peter for tourist attractions like the country palace of Peterhof, the Summer Gardens and the Kunstkammer museum.

After numerous fairly ineffective rulers, the next great figure in St Petersburg's history was Catherine the Great, who was second only to Peter the Great in the shaping of modern St Petersburg. A voracious reader and enthusiastic scholar, she conducted extensive correspondence with Voltaire and hosted many scholars from western Europe, including the philosopher Diderot. Smolnyi Cathedral was largely her doing and the Hermitage—now one of the world's greatest museums—was comprised of Catherine's own art collection in the Winter Palace.

By the 19th century the Empire was increasingly subject to both internal and external pressures. Nicholas I took over the reigns after the failed Decembrist uprising and promptly set out on a reign characterized by harsh repression and extreme political conservatism. The flip-side of this political conservatism was the growth of a dissident intelligentsia (the word itself is of Russian origin) who began whispering of revolution. The great Russian writer Dostoevskii was a member of the Petrashevskii circle of St Petersburg dissidents, a crime for which he was later sent into Siberian exile.

Despite the relative liberalism of Alexander II's rule (which included the emancipation of the serfs) the forces of revolution continued to gather steam. A political demonstration was held before the Kazan Cathedral in 1876. In 1881, the Tsar was assassinated by the revolutionary terrorist group the 'People's Will,' and the Saviour on Spilled Blood Cathedral was erected in his memory.

Towards the end of the twentieth century, Russia finally embarked upon a period of significant industrialisation but the conservative Tsar Alexander III (1881-94) was even less inclined than his predecessor to political change. This was a potentially explosive situation, especially as Russia's intelligentsia had already begun soaking up Marxist theories on the revolutionary potential of the emergent working class. On St Petersburg's Vasilievskii Island, the workers' slums and the potentially radical student population (which was located in close proximity) was a volatile combination.

Alexander III died in 1894 and power was duly passed to his son Nicholas II. In 1905, a minor revolution of sorts took place. St Petersburg played host to the bloody and entirely unnecessary slaughter which took place on what came to be known as Bloody Sunday, when government forces fired on what was by all accounts a peaceful protest in front of the Winter Palace. This action sparked off a wave of mutinies, strikes and uprisings which were threatening enough to force Nicholas II to create a pseudo-democratic parliament (the Duma) and provide the people with a guarantee of basic civil rights. This largely placated the country's stormy mood until the start of the First World War.

World War One proved utterly disastrous for Russia – incompetent leadership and huge casualties proved troubling to a population already suffering wartime hardships. This discontent only fueled revolutionary fires and by March 1917, Nicholas' position was untenable. He abdicated, and after his brother Mikhail wisely refused to take over, Nicholas and his family were shipped off to the town of Ekaterinburg beyond the Urals where the Romanov dynasty was consigned to the past. By the end of the year, the precarious new bourgeois state had collapsed and was replaced by a communist regime that would last over 70 years. During the tumultuous events of the October revolution, Lenin and his cohorts used the Smolnyi Institute as an administrative base.

The years leading up to the Second World War were marked by major upheaval and mass repression under Stalin. As the capital city, the newly-named Leningrad bore the brunt of Party purges. The city's great 20th century poet Anna Akhmatova lost numerous friends and family and was herself condemned as "half-nun, half-whore" but she survived until 1966.

During the Second World War the city suffered more than any other in the world. For three years the Germans besieged Leningrad, starving up to one million of its population to death. Although today the number of blokadniks (survivors of the blockade) is dwindling rapidly, the siege is still firmly embedded in the city's collective consciousness. A Victory Monument stands in the middle of Moskovskii Prospekt and elsewhere there is a Blockade Museum as well as the Piskarevskoe Cemetery, a solemn place where many of the dead were buried in mass graves.

After the destruction caused by the war, Leningrad had to go through a period of extensive reconstruction. Some buildings—like St Isaac's Cathedral—still bear scars of wartime bombardment.

Russia experienced something of a political and cultural thaw after the death of Stalin in 1953, but that was quickly followed by a period of stagnation under the complacent Brezhnev. When Gorbachev came to power in 1985, the USSR was in dire need of renovation and Gorbachev sought to achieve this through the twin motors of glasnost (openness in public discourse) and perestroika (economic reconstruction). However, by the end of the eighties the entire system was looking untenable and by 1990 things were beginning to come apart. By June 1991 Leningrad had been renamed St Petersburg in defiance of Gorbachev's wishes.

When Gorbachev was sidelined by a conservative coup, hundreds of thousands of people massed on Palace Square as they awaited the result of events in Moscow. In the end, the coup broke down and with it any future for the Soviet Union. The post-Communist era had begun.

Modern St Petersburg has undergone a radical transformation and differs greatly from what it looked like at the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union. The central thoroughfare Nevskii Prospekt is a cluster of new entertainment venues, expensive restaurants and upscale shops. However, beneath the glittering new look lies both brand new poverty and St Petersburg's eternally thriving cultural life.