A History of St. Petersburg

St Petersburg under the Tsars

It was Peter the Greats desire to make Russia a European power that led to the founding of St Petersburg. At the start of the Great Northern War of 1700-21 he captured the Swedish outposts on the Neva, and in 1703 he founded the Peter & Paul Fortress on the Neva a few miles in from the sea. After Peter trounced the Swedes at Poltava in 1709 the city he named, in the Dutch style, Sankt Pieter Burkh really began to grow. Canals were dug to drain the marshy south bank and in 1712 he made the place his capital, forcing administrators, nobles and merchants to move there and build new homes. Peasants were drafted in for forced labor, many dying from exposure and overwork. Architects and artisans were brought from all over Europe. By Peter's death in 1725, his city had a huge population and 90% of Russia's foreign trade passed through it.

Between 1741 and 1825 under Empress Elizabeth, Catherine the Great and Alexander I it became a cosmopolitan city with a royal court of famed splendor. These monarchs commissioned great series of palaces, government buildings and churches, which turned it into one of Europe's grandest capitals.

The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and industrialization, which peaked in the 1890s, brought a flood of poor workers into the city, leading to overcrowding, poor sanitation, epidemics and festering discontent. St Petersburg became a hotbed of strikes and political violence and was the hub of the 1905 revolution, sparked on January 9th 1905 when a strikers' march to petition the tsar in the Winter Palace was fired on by troops. By 1914, when in a wave of patriotism at the start of WWI the city's name was changed to the Russian-style Petrograd, it housed 2 million people.

The Bolshevik Revolution and Communist Domination

Petrograd was again the cradle of revolution in 1917. It was here that workers' protests turned into a general strike and troops mutinied, forcing the end of the monarchy in March of that year. The Petrograd Soviet, a socialist focus for workers' and soldiers' demands, started meeting in the city's Tauride Palace alongside the country's reformist Provisional Government. It was to Petrograd that Lenin traveled in April, 1917 to organize the Bolshevik Party. The Bolsheviks occupied key positions in Petrograd on October 24th. The new government operated from the city until March 1918, when it moved to Moscow, fearing a German attack on Petrograd. The city was renamed Leningrad after Lenin's death in 1924. It was a hub of Stalin's 1930s industrialization program and by 1939 had 3 million people and 11% of Soviet industrial output.

When the Germans attacked the USSR in June 1941 it took them only two-and-a-half months to reach Leningrad. His troops besieged it from September 1941 until late January 1944. Many people had been evacuated; nonetheless, between 500,000 and a million died from shelling, starvation and disease.

Post War and the Fall of Communism

After the war, Leningrad was reconstructed and reborn, though it took until 1960 for its population to exceed pre-WWII levels. In 1991, with the fall of the Soviet Union, the residents of Leningrad voted to rename the city St Petersburg. Foreign investment has given the city a boost and St Petersburg has re-established itself as Russia's window on the West.