Author Description

INTRODUCTION Where were you born? St Petersburg. Where did you go to school? Petrograd. Where do you live now? Leningrad. And where would you like to live? St Petersburg. St Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad and now, again, St Petersburg – as this tongue-in-cheek Russian catechism suggests, the city’s succession of names mirrors Russia’s turbulent history. Founded in 1703 as a "window on the West" by Peter the Great, St Petersburg was for two centuries the capital of the Tsarist Empire, synonymous with hubris, excess and magnificence. During World War I the city renounced its Germanic-sounding name and became Petrograd, and as such was the cradle of the revolutions that overthrew Tsarism and brought the Bolsheviks to power in 1917. Later, as Leningrad, it epitomized the Soviet Union’s heroic sacrifices in the war against Fascism, withstanding almost nine hundred days of Nazi siege. Finally, in 1991 – the year that Communism and the USSR collapsed – the change of name, back to St Petersburg, proved deeply symbolic, infuriating the wartime generation and die-hard Communists, but overjoying those who pined for a pre-revolutionary golden age; a dream kept alive throughout the years of Stalinist terror, when the poet Osip Mandelstam (who died in a labour camp) wrote: "We shall meet again in Petersburg..." St Petersburg’s sense of its own identity owes much to its origins and to the interweaving of myth and reality throughout its history. Created by the will of an autocrat, on a barren river delta on the same latitude as the southern tip of Greenland, the Imperial capital embodied both Peter the Great’s rejection of Old Russia – represented by the former capital, "Asiatic" Moscow – and his embrace of Europe. The city’s architecture, administration and social life were all copied or imported, the splendid buildings appearing alien to the indigenous forms and out of place in the surrounding countryside. Artificiality and self-consci