History of Saint Petersburg

The history of Saint Petersburg begins where, at the start of the 18th century, the borders of the Muscovite Tsardom did not yet reach the sea, and the mouth of the Neva remained Swedish-contested territory. Peter I needed a Baltic port — without one, access to European trade and shipbuilding remained theoretical. The Great Northern War of 1700–1721 became the frame within which the new city arose: as soon as Russian troops wrested the lands at the mouth of the Neva from the Swedes in the spring of 1703, the tsar ordered a fortress to be built here.

Peter’s Fortress on the Marsh

On 27 May 1703 (16 May Old Style), the Peter and Paul Fortress was laid down on Hare Island — this date is conventionally regarded as the city’s founding day. The site was chosen by Peter I together with Alexander Menshikov and the French engineer Joseph-Gaspard Lambert de Guérin a few days before construction began. Nearby, on the right bank of the Neva, still stood the ruins of the Swedish fortress Nyenskans, which the Russians had taken that same month. The earthen ramparts were thrown up over the summer so that by autumn the island could already repel a possible Swedish strike; stone construction did not begin until 1706.

The city was named in honour of the Apostle Peter, the tsar’s heavenly patron — an important nuance: Saint Petersburg is named not for its founder but for the saint. In its first years it was built literally as a military base: barracks, warehouses, shipyards. Already in 1704 the Admiralty was founded on the left bank, and shipbuilding became the second axis, after the fortress, of the young settlement. The conditions were brutal: marsh, floods, a shortage of stone — Peter banned stone construction across the rest of Russia in order to redirect masters and materials to the banks of the Neva.

In 1712 the royal court and the central institutions moved here from Moscow — Petersburg became the de facto capital of the state, although the status was never formally enshrined by decree. Merchants and craftsmen were resettled here by quota, foreign architects and engineers were brought in on contracts; Domenico Trezzini, an Italian from Swiss Ticino, laid out Vasilyevsky Island and designed the Peter and Paul Cathedral and the Twelve Collegia Building. By the end of the Great Northern War and the signing of the Treaty of Nystad in 1721, the young city was already the administrative and naval centre of the empire that Peter officially proclaimed that same year.

Imperial Capital of the 18th–19th Centuries

After Peter’s death in 1725 it briefly seemed that the court would return to Moscow — Peter II did indeed move the residence back in 1728. But as early as 1732 Anna Ioannovna returned the capital to Petersburg, and for nearly two hundred years thereafter the city remained the political heart of Russia. Under Elizabeth Petrovna, Bartolomeo Rastrelli was at work — his hands produced the Winter Palace in its present form (completed in 1762), the Smolny Convent, and the palaces at Peterhof and Tsarskoye Selo. The mid-century baroque set that hypertrophied scale which classicism would later take up.

Under Catherine II the capital became one of the centres of European culture. In 1764 the imperial collection was founded, giving rise to the Hermitage: the first 317 paintings were bought from the Berlin merchant Gotzkowsky. The same period saw the appearance of the Academy of Arts, the granite embankments of the Neva, and the Tauride and Marble Palaces. In 1782, on Senate Square, the Bronze Horseman by Étienne Falconet was unveiled — a monument that set the city’s main visual motif for a century and a half.

The 19th century arrived with two sharp shocks. On 14 December 1825, on that same Senate Square, Guards officers led their regiments out against the oath to Nicholas I — the Decembrist uprising was crushed by evening, and its participants were sent to Siberia. Thirty years later, in 1837, Russia’s first railway opened in the city — running to Tsarskoye Selo; in 1851 the Moscow–Petersburg line began operating, and the capital became, once and for all, the empire’s transport hub. By mid-century the construction of Saint Isaac’s Cathedral was completed (1818–1858, architect Auguste de Montferrand) — a symbol of mature Petersburg classicism.

In the second half of the 19th century Petersburg lived through literature and industrialisation at once. Pushkin was killed here in a duel in 1837; Gogol and Dostoevsky wrote about the foggy, sickly, and at the same time mesmerising city. Factories appeared — the Putilov, Obukhov, and Baltic works — and with them the workers’ outskirts: the Vyborg Side, the Narva and Neva Gates districts. On the spot where Alexander II was mortally wounded by members of the People’s Will on the embankment of the Catherine Canal in 1881, the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood was raised by 1907. By the start of the 20th century the city had a population of around two million — it had become one of the largest capitals in Europe.

Revolutions, Leningrad, the Siege

With the outbreak of the First World War, a patriotic wave forced the authorities to abandon the German sound of the name: on 31 August 1914, by decree of Nicholas II, Saint Petersburg was renamed Petrograd. Two and a half years later, in February 1917, strikes and rallies began on Znamenskaya Square and Nevsky Prospekt that grew into the February Revolution and led to the emperor’s abdication. On 25 October 1917 (7 November New Style), an armed coup took place in Petrograd: the garrison and the Red Guard seized key buildings, and the Provisional Government was arrested in the Winter Palace. Thus began Soviet rule.

Already in March 1918, fleeing the advance of German troops, the Sovnarkom moved the government to Moscow — Petrograd lost the capital status it had held for more than two hundred years. The Civil War and famine cut the population almost threefold: by 1920 the city had about seven hundred thousand inhabitants against two and a half million in 1916. On 26 January 1924, four days after Lenin’s death, the Second All-Union Congress of Soviets renamed Petrograd Leningrad.

The 1920s and 1930s were a slow recovery of industry, avant-garde architectural experiments on the outskirts (the constructivist housing blocks near Traktornaya Street, the Gorky Palace of Culture), and, at the same time, waves of repression, especially brutal after Kirov’s assassination at the Smolny in December 1934.

On 8 September 1941 German forces closed the ring around Leningrad — the Siege began and lasted 872 days. From hunger, shelling, and bombing, by various estimates, between 640 thousand and a million residents perished. The Road of Life across Lake Ladoga — by water in summer, over the ice in winter — made it possible to evacuate part of the population and to bring in food. The Siege was partially broken on 18 January 1943 in the course of Operation Iskra and lifted entirely on 27 January 1944 — that date has since remained one of the heaviest and most important in the city’s memory. Many of the suburban palaces — Peterhof, Tsarskoye Selo, Pavlovsk, Gatchina — were looted and burned by the retreating German units; their restoration took decades.

The Return of the Name and the City Today

Postwar Leningrad was rebuilt long and meticulously: the facades of the centre were raised by the early 1950s, the suburban palaces — in places only by the end of the 20th century. In 1955 the first metro line opened, from Avtovo to Ploshchad Vosstaniya; the city grew through mass standard housing construction in the south and the north. In 1991 the collapse of the Soviet system coincided with a long-standing public movement to restore the historical name. On 12 June 1991, in a referendum, 54 percent of the city’s residents voted for the name “Saint Petersburg”; on 6 September 1991, by decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, Leningrad officially recovered its original name.

For the city’s 300th anniversary in 2003, Palace Square, the Peter and Paul Fortress, and the suburban palaces were restored on a grand scale; in the Amber Room of the Catherine Palace the long restoration was completed. In the 2000s and 2010s the city gained new transport links — the Ring Road with the dam across the Gulf of Finland (which also brought to an end the centuries-long fight against flooding by shielding the centre), a new terminal at Pulkovo Airport, and new metro stations. Today around 5.6 million people live in Saint Petersburg, and its historic centre has been on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 1990 — and reads as a single ensemble in which one can still see Peter’s straight lines, Catherine’s granite, late Art Nouveau, and the scars of the 20th century.