Peter's Baltic city was empire's window and later Leningrad
Saint Petersburg—once Petrograd, then Leningrad—is Russia's second-largest city after Moscow, on the Neva at the Gulf of Finland. About 5.60 million lived in the 1,439-square-kilometre city in 2021, with over 6.4 million in the wider area.
Peter the Great founded it 27 May 1703 on a taken Swedish fort, naming it for the apostle; it was imperial capital from 1712 to 1918. Over fifteen million tourists came in 2018 to the Northern Capital, home to the Constitutional Court and Heraldic Council.
Before Peter, Swedish colonists had built the Nyenskans fortress at the Neva's mouth in 1611, with the small town of Nyen around it, in lands once home to Finnic Izhorians and Votians. Peter wanted a better seaport than Arkhangelsk on the White Sea, frozen in winter, and after taking Nyenskans in May 1703 he laid out the Peter and Paul Fortress on Hare Island, the city's first brick and stone building. Conscripted serfs, joined at times by Swedish prisoners, built the city, and tens of thousands of them died. Domenico Trezzini's 1716 plan for a canal grid on Vasilyevsky Island was never finished but still shapes the streets.
The names kept changing. In 1914, with war against Germany under way, Nicholas II switched to Petrograd to drop the German Sankt and Burg; it became Leningrad in January 1924, and a referendum on 12 June 1991, with 55 percent for Saint Petersburg against 43 percent for Leningrad, restored the old name, though the surrounding oblast is still Leningrad. It has also been called the Window to Europe and the Venice of the North, and it is the world's northernmost city of over a million people.
Source: Saint Petersburg
