Who ruled Saint Petersburg?

Saint Petersburg stands on the marshy islands of the Neva delta, where the river flows out of Lake Ladoga into the Gulf of Finland. Unlike most great cities, it did not grow slowly from a village: Peter the Great founded it in 1703 on land just taken from Sweden, to give Russia a port and a capital facing Europe. For two centuries it was the seat of the tsars, and it later lived through the revolutions of 1917 and one of the most terrible sieges in history. Its three names, Saint Petersburg, Petrograd and Leningrad, mark those turning points.

The Neva was an important waterway on the route from the Baltic to the Russian river system, and Finnic peoples such as the Izhorians and Votes fished and farmed along its banks. From the Middle Ages the area belonged to the lands of Novgorod, and in 1240 the Novgorodian prince Alexander Nevsky defeated a Swedish force near the mouth of the Izhora, a victory that later became a national legend. Russian and Swedish rule over the delta shifted for centuries. After the Time of Troubles, Sweden gained the whole region, called Ingria, by the Treaty of Stolbovo in 1617 and guarded the Neva with the fortress of Nyenschantz and its small trading town, Nyen.

In the Great Northern War, Peter the Great captured Nyenschantz in May 1703 and on 27 May (16 May in the old Russian calendar) laid the foundations of the Peter and Paul Fortress on Hare Island, the official birth of the city. He named it after his patron saint, in a Dutch-influenced form. Tens of thousands of conscripted serfs and Swedish prisoners drained marshes and drove piles, and many died of disease and exhaustion. Nobles and merchants were ordered to move there, and around 1712 the court and government transferred from Moscow, making Saint Petersburg the capital of what became, in 1721, the Russian Empire.

Peter's successors, above all Elizabeth and Catherine the Great, employed Italian, French and Russian architects to build the Winter Palace, the great cathedrals and the granite embankments, and Catherine's art collection formed the core of the Hermitage. The city became the centre of Russian literature and science, home to the Academy of Sciences, Pushkin and Dostoevsky. It was also the stage for political drama. The Decembrist officers rose on the Senate Square in December 1825, and in 1881 revolutionaries assassinated Alexander II on a city canal. Industry grew rapidly after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, and by 1900 the city held more than a million people, many in crowded factory districts.

On Bloody Sunday in January 1905 troops fired on workers marching to the Winter Palace, setting off the Revolution of 1905. In 1914, at the start of the First World War, the city was renamed Petrograd to sound less German. In February 1917 strikes and mutinies there ended the monarchy, and in October Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks seized power in the city, the decisive moment of the Russian Revolution. In March 1918 the government moved to Moscow, and after Lenin's death in 1924 the city was renamed Leningrad.

During World War II German and Finnish forces cut the city off from 8 September 1941 until 27 January 1944, a siege of almost 900 days. Food ran out in the first winter, and supplies arrived only across Lake Ladoga, by boat or over the ice. Estimates of civilian deaths, mostly from starvation, range from about 800,000 to more than a million. After the war the city was rebuilt and its palaces restored. In 1991, as the Soviet Union collapsed, residents voted to restore the name Saint Petersburg. Today it is Russia's second city, with about 5.6 million inhabitants, a major port and industrial centre, and its historic centre is a UNESCO World Heritage site.