St Petersburg was founded by Peter the Great in 1703. Its location on the Baltic Sea was chosen so that Russia could develop a seaport as Peter was determined to forge a new Russia by opening the country to Europe. He had to defeat not only Sweden who controlled part of the region, but also the unsuitable land and armies of peasants and prisoners of war were forced to work to convert the swamp into a glittering city with many dying in the process. After Peter’s death, first Empress Elizabeth and then Catherine the Great continued the development of St Petersburg and it grew in splendour to become one of Europe’s grandest capitals.
The Romanovs had ruled for over 200 years and increased the Russian Empire but they still relied on autocracy and when serfdom was finally abolished in 1862, the serfs ended up worse off than before and moved to the cities to work in factories where conditions were terrible. Disillusionment brought revolt, starting with the People’s Will who assassinated Alexander II with a grenade in the street in St Petersburg in 1881.
By 1905, unrest had escalated and St Petersburg had become a hotbed of strikes and political violence and on ‘Bloody Sunday’ strikers marched to petition the tsar in the Winter Palace and were fired on by troops. Maxim Gorky was there that day and wrote that the Tsars prestige has been killed here, that is the meaning of this day. In 1917 the workers’ protests became a general strike and this led to Lenin’s coup in St Petersburg which made Russia the world’s first communist state.
The capital returned to Moscow in 1918, Stalin came to power and after Lenin’s death in 1924 St Petersburg was renamed Leningrad and it became a hub of Stalin’s industrialisation program. The defining event of the 20th century for Leningrad was the Nazi blockade of some 900 days during WWII when around a million people died from shelling, starvation and disease as Hitler tried – unsuccessfully – to wipe the city from the earth as the home of Bolshevism.
Once the USSR crumbled in 1991, citizens voted to rename the city St Petersburg, it was spruced up for its 2003 its tercentenary celebrations and local boy Vladimir Putin continues to promote the city of his birth.
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