The City of St. Petersburg

By Ryan McRowe

St. Petersburg was founded in 1703 by Tsar and Russia’s first emperor Peter the Great on swamp landed he seized from Sweden, and while a war raged to hold that land from the now indignant Swedes. This new city was to be one of Peter the Great’s first and greatest tangible achievements for his westernization reforms of his empire. Its position on the Baltic would give Russia one of its first war water ports with full access to much of Europe, and northern Europe (where Peter traveled and studied extensively) in particular. Construction of the city would be a monumental struggle that would cost thousands of lives and require levels of effort and manpower that had never been seen in Russia, the first in a long history of mass public works projects in Russia’s history. Sitting on a swamp as well as below sea level would prove a constant headache for the populace, floods were a regular occurrence for most of the city (one would even eventually kill its founder when Peter contracted pneumonia, from depending on the account, either rescuing people from his boat or falling off it accidentally). Floods would only cease being a threat to the city when the massive 16-mile St. Petersburg Dam was built, begun in 1979 and only finished in 2011. On top of this, the soggy soil was less than ideal for the kind of heavy stone construction that Peter mandated for his city, this would be remedied with the inserting of over twenty-five million pine logs into the ground to stabilize it. The tsars would call St. Petersburg their home and capital for over two hundred years after its founding, its central status fall with the imperial family during the Revolution, that started in the streets below the Winter Palace.

St. Petersburg, as the first center of power in Russia, was the center of Bolshevik activity prior to and in the early days of the Revolution. One of the first acts of the revolutionaries would be to relocate the center of power from the tsars’ creation of St. Petersburg back to Russia’s more organic first city of Moscow and as further spite to the tsars would rename the city Leningrad. Despite of its artificial inception, the city would prove more resilient than its founders and would survive the realignment as Russia’s second city. Early in the Soviet Era the city’s communist boss, and de facto mayor, Sergey Kirov, rose to great popularity, effectiveness, and admiration, his position becoming one of such prominence that he would be murdered, under suspicious circumstances, in what could quite easily be understood as an assassination ordered by Stalin. The city’s importance would again be brought to the fore when the Germans invested into a nearly three year siege of Leningrad in what would become one of the longest and deadliest sieges in history, leading to deaths of over three million people along with the destruction or looting of many priceless buildings and art. The siege would destroy a great deal of the city but due to a combination of Soviet determination and German sentimentality most of the greatest monuments and artifacts survived. With the collapse of the Soviet Union the freshly renamed city, once again St. Petersburg, gained a new prominence in also rechristened Russian Federation, as the literal cradle of power (once again) with the rise fall of President Yeltsin and the rise of Vladimir Putin. Putin’s ascent to the Russian presidency would see him bring in his “Petersburg Gang” from Prime Minister Medvedev to Federal Council Chairman Matviyenko to rule the country, which they do to this day.