St. Petersburg is without a doubt one of the world’s most interesting cities. Located only a few degrees south of the Arctic Circle, 640 kilometers northwest of Moscow, it is the second-largest city in Russia. Many people consider it the cultural capital of Russia—and for good reason. It is a city of great architectural, cultural, and historical significance, and unlike any other city in the world.
It is hard to believe that a city that is so much a part of Russian history has been in existence for only three hundred years. When Czar Peter the Great came to power in 1682, he was intent on modernizing Russia. Having spent a good deal of his youth in Europe, he dreamed of making his Russian homeland more like the countries of Western Europe. After he captured the area near what is now known as the Gulf of Finland from Sweden, he immediately started to build St. Petersburg on the delta where the Neva River flows into the Gulf of Finland. He chose that specific spot because it has water access to the Baltic Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. For this reason, the city is often called Russia’s "window to Europe." On May 16, 1703, Peter positioned the stones of the Peter and Paul Fortress, the first structure in St. Petersburg.
But the city’s location brought certain problems. Building St. Petersburg was difficult because the site is a swampy river delta where the many tributaries of the Neva flow into the gulf. The Neva sometimes floods, causing widespread death and destruction over the years. In addition, the severe northern climate with its long, dark winters resulted in the deaths of many workers. For all these reasons, people weren’t eager to help Peter build this city, so he resorted to using forced labor.
Although the czar had wanted to make St. Petersburg look like a Western European city, it soon developed a unique appearance of its own. Peter had originally imagined that people would travel in boats floating on the canals, as they do in Venice and Amsterdam, two European cities that he wanted to imitate. But after his death, people began to focus more on building bridges and streets instead, which encouraged travel on land more than on water. Although most of the planned water routes were abandoned, many remain—the reason that St. Petersburg is also known as the "Venice of the North." To make passage possible, the city boasts an astonishing 342 bridges, including many drawbridges across the Neva that allow large ships to come upriver.
In addition to its bridges, St. Petersburg has so many palaces, each one unique in style and design, that it is often called "the city of palaces." One of the most renowned is the rulers’ Winter Palace, now a part of the State Hermitage Museum. This complex, which consists of the Winter Palace and five other buildings on the banks of the Neva, is home to one of the world’s finest collections of Russian, Asian, and Western European art. The Winter Palace is astounding both inside and out; the green and white three-story building takes up an entire block, features many classical columns, and has sculptures perched on its roof. Seeing its 1,057 rooms—filled with marble, chandeliers, gold, and more than three million paintings and artifacts—would take a visitor more than a week.
The rulers of St. Petersburg supported the performing arts as well as the visual arts. Many of the enduring Russian symphonies and operas, such as Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades, premiered in St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater. The Mariinsky Theater is also home to the Mariinsky Ballet Company, one of the most famous ballet troupes in history.
St. Petersburg also has many magnificent churches. One distinguished edifice, St. Isaac’s Cathedral, has one of the world’s largest gilded domes—it is covered in more than one hundred kilograms of gold. Another, named the Church of Our Savior on Spilled Blood, was erected as a memorial to Czar Alexander II on the very spot where he was assassinated in 1881 by a young man who threw a bomb into his carriage as the czar drove through the streets of St. Petersburg. This structure typifies the colorful mosaics and onion domes that are characteristic of Russian architecture.
One of St. Petersburg’s most recognizable monuments is the bronze statue of Peter the Great on horseback, posed on top of a huge piece of granite. Unveiled in 1782, the statue has become an icon of the city. The statue plays a key role in "The Bronze Horseman," a famous epic poem published in 1833 by Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s most revered poet. The poem features a peasant who loses everything during one of the Neva’s devastating floods and who comes to believe that he is being chased around the city by the statue of Peter the Great. In fact, the statue is now called The Bronze Horseman, in homage to the poem.
St. Petersburg has also inspired many other writers and been the setting for many of their works. St. Petersburg’s bitterly cold and dark winters prompted Nikolai Gogol to set his famous short story "The Overcoat" during these long, snowy nights. Conversely, the hot, humid summers, when the sun barely dips below the horizon at night (a phenomenon known as "the white nights") were the setting for Fyodor Dostoevsky’s famous novel Crime & Punishment.
St. Petersburg also has reminders of its more recent and tragic history. During World War II, the Nazis laid siege to Leningrad—as St. Petersburg was called by Russia’s communist leaders from the 1920s until 1991—on September 8, 1941. Thousands of people there died of starvation because Hitler and the German army prevented nearly all supplies from reaching the city. Many people were reduced to eating rats in order to survive. Others froze to death during terribly cold winters, when temperatures reached as low as negative forty degrees Celsius. A plaque on one of the columns of St. Isaac’s Cathedral serves as a memorial to the 660,000 people who died during the nine-hundred-day siege.
It is impossible to walk around St. Petersburg without encountering evidence of its historical and artistic heritage. The artists, musicians, and writers who have lived here throughout its history have embraced the best of Europe, as Peter the Great intended, and their own distinct Russian culture as well. St. Petersburg has undoubtedly exceeded the expectations of its founder, who would be proud that the city everyone told him could not be built is now one of the most amazing cities in the world.