Violent history of Saint-Petersburg

The city of Saint Petersburg has gone through many changes of identity, symbolized by the changing of the city's name. At the time of the founding (1703), it was named after its patron saint, Saint Peter.

The official court historian Nikolai Karamzin wrote that city was found “on tears and corpses”. In 1717, it was declared the new capital of Russia, and had a population of more than 40,000 by 1725. Because of the violence that went into its construction, the masses of the working class were resentful toward the city.

After Peter the Great's death in 1725, the city and the country were ruled by Catherine the Great. As Czar Peter had established Saint Petersburg as his “window to the west”, Catherine would also make changes to the city to make it more European.

In 1914, Czar Nicholas II ordered the name to change from St. Petersburg to Petrograd.
 
In 1918 Vladimir Lenin moved the capital from Petrograd to Moscow.

In 1924, Soviet Congress wrote in a special resolution, “Let this major center of the proletarian revolution from this day forward be connected with the name of the greatest leader of the proletariat, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin”. Until 1991, the city and outlying area would be called Leningrad. In that year, there were many political battles between the communist hard-liners and the liberals.

As poet Alexander Kushner wrote at the time, “I had the fortune to be born in Leningrad and I will die, God willing, in Petersburg”. After the city's name change, the region retained its old name, Leningrad.

The city of Saint Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast have a violent history. In 1993, Klyuchevsky wrote, “I doubt one could find a battle in military history that led to the death of more soldiers than the number of laborers who died in building of Saint Petersburg”. In reality, however, this was just the beginning of violence in the region, with both world wars doing vast amounts of damage to the land, industry, and society in the area. Only recently has population figures in Leningrad surpassed the pre-World War II population statistics.